Red Cell One
by Tajjas
Summary: Apparently when Cooper had said that he was putting together an experimental team with the blessings of the FBI Director, he'd really meant experimental. Chronicles the start of Cooper's Red Cell team from the perspectives of Mick and Prophet.
1. Mick: First Impressions

_Because I don't have enough other stories in progress, I thought I'd let this plot bunny loose too: a few chapters on the initial formation of Cooper's Red Cell team centering on Mick and Prophet (and can I just say damn all Netflix recommendations that popped up while I wasn't feeling well). From a comment in the backdoor pilot, I've got Mick joining the team in 2009, and then I worked the rest of this around that. No Gina yet, and definitely no Beth since she was a recent addition in 2011, not sure if they'll make it into this story or not._

_For the record, since the show never went into it except for Mick's jokes about Prophet's age, I just used the actors' ages in this story when I needed to sort out timelines, which puts Prophet at 41 and Mick at 30 in 2011 (39 and 28 at the start of this story)._

* * *

Mick rubbed his forehead and refrained from cursing only by great force of will. He'd thought that the amount of paperwork that he'd had to do in the military was ridiculous, especially since most of the ops he'd been on were so classified that his reports had probably all been burned rather than read _anyway_, but right now the American Federal Bureau of Investigation was putting everything that he'd seen previously to shame.

More than half of what he was filling out didn't even apply to him since he wasn't a US citizen, but of course there were no 'not applicable' bubbles anywhere on these stupid green forms, and when he'd asked the woman at the desk who'd handed him the paperwork in the first place, all he'd received was a blank stare in return. Even his best attempt at flirting hadn't been enough to get her to budge about what had to be completed, though calling it his best attempt wasn't saying much right now considering how long it had been since he'd slept. At this point he was filling in what he could and making up answers for the rest and praying that he managed well enough that he wouldn't have to redo anything. Although if any did come back with red flags, he was damn well making Coop figure it out. After all, it had been his idea to pull Mick into this new team he was putting together in the first place.

Mick rubbed his forehead and then flipped to the next page. To be fair, the fact that his plane had only arrived two hours ago—and that his miserable luck when it came to sleeping on planes had held all-too true— was a good part of what had him in such a lousy temper, and he knew it. His _original_ plan had been to get in a couple days early, meet up with Coop and do some catching up, and get the lay of the land a little before getting down to work, but with the strikes in Cardiff his flight to Paris had been held up, and then they'd had to route him through bloody Chicago rather than directly here, and between the delay and the detour all of his extra time had disappeared. He hadn't even had a chance to drop his suitcase off at his temporary FBI-assigned flat before being shoved into this room with twenty-odd strangers and a stack of papers ten inches high.

He reached the end of the third packet, and this time he did swear under his breath as he realized that he still had one line of green bubbles left. He went back up the page checking quickly and found his error, but the missed question had been about thirty lines earlier so he was going to have to waste another five minutes just shifting his answers down. He shook his head and made an attempt at erasing the last bubble he'd filled in, but apparently he'd been given a defective pencil along with everything else because all it did was smudge up the paper. And he knew that there weren't any pencils in the suitcase sitting beside him. He sighed and looked up. "Can I borrow a rubber?"

Stares and then laughter—some smothered, most not—met his question, and he flushed even as he tried to figure out what the hell he'd said that was funny.

"Suppose if you really want one, they'll have them at the drugstore down on the corner," the man behind him said quietly, a drawl audible in his voice, "but I'm having a hard time believing that anyone is that into paperwork."

Mick twisted to scowl him, opening his mouth to snap that of course he wanted a rubber—how else was he supposed to change his responses on these damn forms?—when he remembered that what Americans called a rubber, he would have called a condom. It, along with a few other language oddities, had been a good source of jokes when Coop and the other Americans had first been grafted into his unit, and if he wasn't half asleep, he'd have remembered that. "_Eraser_," he growled, feeling his flush deepen. On a better day, he might have managed to come up with a joke to cover his mistake, but right now he just wanted to sink into the desk.

The amusement in the other man's eyes didn't fade, but he did refrain from any more commentary as he offered a pencil with an intact rubber, and Mick took it with a mutter of thanks that was more automatic than genuine. _Great_ way to make a first impression on his new coworkers, there. If he was very lucky no one in this room would be working within twenty miles of Coop's new team, but given the way his luck had been going the last few days, he'd probably be running into half a dozen of them on a daily basis.

There was some commotion a few minutes later as the man who'd loaned Mick the pencil tried to turn in his paperwork and ended up in an argument with the woman at the desk. He managed to convince her to take it by the simple expedient of dropping it on the desk and walking out the door despite her protests, but some dark muttering followed him from the others in the room, and Mick couldn't help but hope that the scene would be enough to make the others in the room forget his little faux pas. Although he had no idea what the muttering could be about; his best guess was that the guy was headed for some kind of white collar division given that he was a good eight or ten years older than Mick rather than a few years younger like most of the people in the room, and he'd seemed pretty harmless. Sure he'd been grinning as much as the rest of them about Mick's mistake, but in the end, at least he'd helped.

It took another half an hour, but Mick finally got the last of his paperwork done, and he handed the packet of papers to the woman at the desk and headed for the exit with a definite feeling of relief. He'd call Coop and let him know that he'd finally made it into town and then catch a taxi to his new flat. Hopefully sleeping the rest of the day away would put him in a better frame of mind.

"Mick!" a familiar voice called before he had time to do more than pull out his mobile.

He halted, dropping it back into his pocket as a smile split his face. "Coop. I wasn't expecting to see you today." He met the other man's outstretched hand automatically and pulled him into a quick hug of greeting.

"I got your message about your flight troubles, but no one called to say you'd missed check-in here, so I figured I'd stop by and try and catch you after paperwork was done," Cooper said. "I was going to introduce you to Prophet, too, but he had somewhere to be this afternoon so you'll have to meet him tomorrow."

As glad as he was to see Cooper, Mick was just as glad that he wouldn't be meeting anyone else today. He didn't particularly want to embarrass himself in front of a stranger that he _knew_ that he was going to be working with, and as tired as he was, it was almost bound to happen.

"So do you want to grab something to eat?"

"Food sounds great." Not quite as great as sleep, maybe, but Mick could hold out for another hour or two, especially since Coop was right here.

* * *

It was amazing what a night's rest could do, Mick decided as he made his way to the gym. It turned out to be only a few miles from his flat, and he'd ended up walking it just to stretch out a little. He hadn't forgotten Coop's obsession with Kali.

He was curious about this new team member that he was supposed to meet. Coop had filled him in on the basics yesterday afternoon, but the basics didn't amount to much more than a nickname—Prophet—and the fact that he was an ex-con who'd killed a pedophile and spent a little over six years in jail for it before being pardoned. And that he'd finished his criminology degree after his release. Now, Mick was about the last person who'd get sanctimonious about killing, and he couldn't say that he'd shed a tear over a pedophile, but despite the degree, he was still a little unsure about what in particular had made Coop pick the man for his team. And even more unsure about how Coop had been _allowed_ to pick him. Granted that if he got the urge, Coop could probably talk a drowning man into having a glass of water, but Mick was pretty sure that there were rules about turning felons into federal agents.

He snorted. Then again, there were rules about foreign nationals too, and while Mick's security clearance—it had officially expired after he'd left the military, but things like that got fuzzy sometimes—had probably helped smooth things over, Coop must have pulled plenty of strings to get him this job as well. Apparently when Cooper said he was putting together an experimental team, he'd really meant experimental.

There was a truck idling on the street in front of the gym, and Mick cut around it, only to pause as he caught sight of a man standing on the driver's side step and talking to whoever was inside. He wasn't totally sure, but that looked an awful lot like—

The man grinned suddenly and said something that Mick couldn't make out over the rumble of the engine, and then he leapt back off the step, landing neatly on the pavement. The engine revved as the driver made a decidedly rude gesture, and then the truck pulled out slowly.

The man shook his head, still smiling, and Mick bit back a groan because that was definitely the man that had loaned him the pencil yesterday. And, short of an incredible coincidence, Prophet. So much for not embarrassing himself.


	2. Prophet: First Impressions

_Thanks to everyone who read and KATesla , stilljustme, narwhayly, and a guest for reviewing._

_Since I apparently forgot to mention it in the first chapter, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior isn't mine. In case anyone was under the impression that it was._

* * *

James' truck rumbled away, and Prophet shook his head. There weren't too many people from the dark days that he kept in touch with, but James was a good guy. Not overly blessed with tact, at least when it came to his opinion of an old friend taking up with the FBI, but he'd been willing enough to accept Prophet's offer of a couch when he'd found that he was going to be on this coast for a night at the end of a long haul. And if the timing hadn't been great, at least it had kept Prophet's mind off this new teammate that he was supposed to be meeting.

Prophet didn't actually know much about Rawson besides his name and the fact that Cooper had served with him somewhere that he either didn't want to or couldn't talk about a few years back, but Cooper had been pretty driven to get him on the team. He had a criminology degree from somewhere in the UK so that wasn't a problem, but the whole not-a-US-citizen thing had been an issue for some of the higher-ups at Bureau, hence him coming in later than Prophet. Prophet shook his head. After Cooper had managed to get approval for _him_, he wasn't too sure what their issue could possibly be, but anyway, if Cooper wanted this guy, Prophet wasn't about to object.

That didn't mean that Rawson wouldn't object to him, though. There were already more than a couple people at the FBI who weren't happy that he'd been allowed to circumvent so many of the normal channels through the academy and into the BAU, and that was without throwing in the felony conviction that should have made him totally ineligible for the FBI in the first place. Despite the fact that the director must have raided the thesaurus for variations on 'probationary' to put in front of his status—there were enough of them that Prophet was pretty sure that he'd be dead of old age well before he'd earned a full agent's badge—visiting the FBI building wasn't exactly a calming experience, and he wasn't looking forward to a similar sort of tension setting in at the gym. Oh, it might not be as bad as he was expecting, it wasn't like this new guy wouldn't be coming at the job sideways as well, but until he actually met him, Prophet wasn't going to hold out a lot of hope.

James turned the corner, his truck disappearing from sight, and Prophet had the sudden, disconcerting feeling of being watched. It wasn't a feeling that he liked, and he fought to keep his expression relaxed as he turned. The person watching him, a younger man in jeans and a leather jacket, wasn't making any attempt to hide, and Prophet returned the favor, meeting his eyes squarely.

Recognition set in abruptly a moment later, and Prophet didn't groan, but only because he'd didn't see much point in wasting perfectly good oxygen on bad news. It was the guy who'd been sitting in front of him during the latest marathon session in the FBI office of paperwork yesterday. As soon as he recognized him, he wondered why it hadn't occurred to him earlier that the man might be his new teammate—there couldn't be that many men wandering around the FBI carrying a suitcase and speaking with an English accent—but somehow the obvious had escaped him, and the guy had had a front row seat for his latest battle with the queen of paperwork. Bitch of paperwork, rather, because that was the third time that Prophet had filled out that same damn batch of forms, and somehow they kept getting 'misplaced.' And if that wasn't bad enough, Rawson had probably gotten an earful from one or two of the other agents in the room after Prophet had left, as well. If nothing else, he knew that Trevors had still been in there when he'd walked out, and that was one recruit who _definitely_ wasn't happy with Prophet's presence at the Bureau. So much for making a good first impression.

"Hey," the man greeted as he approached, preempting anything that Prophet might have said, and there was no denying his guarded expression.

"Hey," Prophet echoed, making sure that his own expression remained neutral. "You'd be Rawson?" He was less of a kid than Prophet had thought at first glance, probably in his late twenties rather than early-to-mid, but that was still younger than Prophet would have expected given what little Cooper _had_ said about their pasts together. He carried himself like he knew what he was about, though, and if his attire wasn't exactly agent-typical, well, neither was Prophet's.

"Mick." He came to a halt in front of Prophet and offered a hand.

"Prophet." Mick's grip was firm but with none of the stupid bravado that came with guys trying to prove their strength by cracking a finger or two, and Prophet relaxed marginally. Not that he couldn't hold his own if he needed to, but mostly he just found that kind of crap annoying. "Jonathan Simms, officially," he continued as they both dropped their arms back to their sides, "but it's been a few years since anyone's called me that." To the point where he wasn't even sure that he'd respond to Jon anymore. Mick nodded, and Prophet gestured towards the building. "We're set up in the back." Another nod, either in acknowledgement or because he already knew that, Prophet wasn't sure, and they walked in in silence.

Cooper was in the gym proper when they entered, engaged in his usual morning ritual of 'clearing his mind,' and the two of them halted along the wall to wait for him to finish. Personally, Prophet called Cooper's idea of sparring 'getting beat on with sticks'…his own fighting style was a mishmash of techniques that he'd picked up over the years, now with a little bit of actual form thrown in on top of it all courtesy of the FBI hand-to-hand course he'd taken last month, but while he was always willing to pick up a new trick or too, he'd yet to end a match with Cooper in any way except lying flat on his back on the floor wondering what the hell happened.

Cooper brought the match to a halt when he caught sight of them, slapping the kid he'd been sparring with lightly on the back and then turning to the two of them with a smile of greeting. "Morning, Prophet. Mick, welcome back to the land of the living."

"Yeah, you're funny, Coop," Mick said at the same time as Prophet's, "Good morning."

"Well, since you two seem to have met, let's get to work." Cooper grabbed his water bottle and nodded towards the far door. "Come on, the office is back this way."

"Nice place you've got here," Mick said dryly as they cut across the gym, and Cooper shook his head.

"Beats the standard FBI fishbowl any day." Cooper waved them into the office ahead of him and then shut the door after him. "Mick, I talked to the director again this morning and managed to get some of your qualification stuff officially waived, but there are a few classes they're still going to require you to sit through. It's mostly procedural-type stuff, but then you'll have to qualify on the FBI grounds for weapons, hand-to-hand, all of that."

"Can I bring my own guns?"

He was grinning when he said it, and between that and the twitch of Cooper's lips there was clearly a story there, presumably one that went a little beyond both having been in the military, but neither of them seemed inclined to fill him in so Prophet filed it away as something to think about later. He didn't really like the feeling, but given that the two of them had worked together before, it was probably something he was going to have to get used to.

"Prophet, you're almost done with all of your requirements, right?" Cooper asked, turning his attention to him.

"Just the range qualification and a couple of the online modules left," Prophet agreed with a nod. "The web stuff is down for updates or whatever, but it's supposed to be back up in a week or two." Until he finished dotting i's and crossing t's he couldn't do more than work the cold case files, and technically he was pretty sure that he wasn't even supposed to be doing that much, but at this point it was either do that or sit around twiddling his thumbs. He'd never much enjoyed enforced idleness even before prison.

"So you could help him out if he needs a hand?"

"Yeah, sure, no problem." It wasn't like he didn't have the material fresh in his mind, even if he had blown through it all a whole lot faster than normal thanks to a combination of Cooper's encouragement and his own desire to spend as little time as possible actually _at_ the academy. He might have a much better handle on his temper now than he'd had when he was a kid, but there was only so long that he could put up with snide looks and muttered comments behind his back. Oh, not all of the other recruits had been like that—probably not even the majority, in truth, and when he wasn't getting frustrated with the more irritating ones, he could acknowledge that aside from the bitch of paperwork and a few others, most of the instructors had been pretty indifferent to him as well—but even the classmates who'd been generally friendly were still fifteen years younger than him, and there just wasn't a lot of common ground in their backgrounds. Mick didn't look too thrilled with the idea, though…Prophet still meant what he'd said about helping, but he figured that the odds of Mick taking him up on it were pretty low.

"I came up with a theory last night about that case we were looking at Friday," Cooper said, turning to grab a manila folder off his desk. "The two triple homicides in Dallas back in 2002?"

"I remember." Prophet boosted himself up to sit on the edge of his desk as Mick took the folder from Cooper and began to flip through it. "A mother and two kids in each case, with the husbands estranged from the families. Cases went cold when the husbands' alibis turned up solid." Apparently Cooper had been serious about them getting right to work, and all things considered, it was probably the smartest thing to do.


	3. Mick: Breaking Ice

_Thanks to everyone who has been reading._

_Fair warning for anyone who cares, I'm cheating the FBI requirements just a bit to let Mick show off a little. But then again I'm also cheating by not making him and Prophet go through the whole academy process as part of a class, and the show cheated by letting Mick and Prophet be FBI agents _period_, so…._

* * *

Mick managed a smile for his waitress as he scribbled his signature on the receipt, but his heart wasn't really in it. People could say what they wanted about snipers and lone-wolf personalities and all of that, but the fact was that _he_ was gregarious by nature, and after about a week in this country, he was starting to get lonely. It wasn't that he needed to be the center of attention all the time or anything—he didn't mind it now and again, especially when pretty girls were involved, but enough of that would make him just as uncomfortable as being alone—but he liked conversation, and he liked being around people, and when he'd accepted Coop's offer, he hadn't really thought much about the fact that he'd be starting over in an unfamiliar place surrounded by total strangers. Or, rather, he'd thought about it, but it hadn't occurred to him that it would be a problem. After all, he'd done it before, and more than once. Unfortunately, he hadn't considered the fact that he'd always been part of a unit before. Units meant built-in mates.

While he did know Cooper, that was pretty much the great extent of his social circle in this country, and nothing against Coop, but his picture was probably posted next to the _definition_ of lone-wolf personality in the dictionary. He was willing enough to go out for dinner or a drink or whatever now and again, but it was by no means a regular thing, and after that meal or drink he preferred to head home. And he probably considered two days alone with nothing to do but paint a relaxing vacation. For Mick, on the other hand, a weekend by himself in an empty flat was more than enough to leave him craving someone—anyone—to talk to.

The first couple evenings after his arrival last week had been filled easily enough just settling in, but after that he'd found himself at somewhat loose ends. Reading about FBI procedures could only hold his attention for so long before he needed to get out and do something, and although there was a pub down the street, it wasn't really his kind of place. Scratches on the floor and scuffs on the bar were one thing, a man could legitimately call that character, but dirt on the glasses was a whole different issue. This little restaurant was nice, but with no one to eat with…. He shook his head. He could always call Jenna, but she was just getting settled into her summer classes, and the last thing he wanted to do was make her worry about him.

He'd had lunch twice last week with classmates from the courses that the FBI wasn't allowing him to skip out on, but so far he hadn't really connected with any of them. The majority of the ones he'd talked to were joining the FBI straight out of college, and while there might be only four or five years between them in age, in terms of life experience, they were a world apart. The half-dozen or so with law enforcement backgrounds had kept mostly to their own little cluster outside of classes, and while there were two guys coming out of the US military—one from the Navy and one from the Marines—that he got along with well enough, for the most part when they weren't sniping about each other's branch of service they were discussing American football. Mick still saw no reason why people would dress up in fifty pounds of padding just to play rugby.

At least he'd _had_ conversations with them, though. With the exception of Cooper, the person he'd spent the most time around this past week had been Prophet, and still the man remained mostly a mystery. He seemed friendly enough, at least in an abstract way, and he hadn't said a word about Mick's screw-up that first day to Coop which Mick appreciated since even if he wouldn't have come in for more than some teasing, it had still been a lousy way to start his time with the FBI, but he hadn't shown any interest in going out after work or anything like that. It made getting to know him difficult. And while having a particularly reserved teammate wasn't a huge issue since it didn't seem to affect his ability to work with them, it didn't do much for Mick's feelings of isolation.

He shook his head and shrugged his jacket on as he headed for the restaurant door. Transportation was his major issue…there weren't that many buses that came through this area, especially on the weekends, and there were a very limited number of things to do within walking distance. If he could get that sorted out, or if he found a permanent flat in a better location, he'd be able to get out more and meet a few more people and that would go a long way towards making him feel comfortable here. Until then, though, he was at something of a loss.

Oh, well. At least tomorrow was Monday. Coop would be back at the gym, and Mick could probably talk him into dinner after work.

* * *

"Dude's house was full of cats dressed in clown costumes," Prophet said with a snort. "Now, I don't think that _officially_ counts as animal torture, but it sure as hell ain't normal."

Mick grinned and caught a flash of teeth from Coop as well. Prophet might not have become any less standoffish since last week, but he did have a decent sense of humor.

"Plus there's the little fact that a couple of those costumes look to be made from the clothes the rape victims reported stolen," Coop added. "The detectives didn't notice at the time since they were focused on finding the missing jewelry—a couple pieces were heirlooms which make it easier to build a case—but I'm looking at these descriptions and the photographs we got, and I can't believe that this is a coincidence."

"There were a lot more cats than rape victims, though," Mick pointed out. "Although I suppose you could make more than one cat costume out of a human-sized shirt." And there was a statement that he never thought that he'd make.

"And we all know how under-reported rape is," Prophet added.

Coop nodded. "Those other costumes could have come from victims who didn't come forward about their assaults. I think they'd better all be considered evidence until proven otherwise."

Mick nodded as well. "So do we send our information to the locals and see if they can get a warrant to take the costumes then, if they haven't been destroyed? And maybe enter the storage unit mentioned in the report as well?" Personally he doubted that any of the cat costumes were still around, not after four months, but he didn't know how far this sort of analysis went with judges. It wasn't exactly a profile since they'd already narrowed things down to a single target, but he was only on about page four of his procedural law book, and he _did_ know that the request for access to the storage unit had already been denied once.

"A profile alone isn't always enough for a warrant," Coop said, "but the fact that we've got a specific target and pictures will more than cover it. Although I doubt a prosecutor would even consider taking it to trial with only a couple photos of cut-down mass-produced garments as evidence. If we don't find the jewelry, we can hope they get lucky and find a costume with some residual DNA on it, but…."

It wasn't impossible, but from Coop's expression he found that just as unlikely as Mick did.

"Hang on." Prophet pushed himself up from his seat on the table, turning to dig around in the stack of victim statements. "What about the third victim? Temple, I think her name was."

"What about her?" Coop asked.

"Wait, she was the seamstress, right?" Mick asked before Prophet could respond, Prophet's sudden interest triggering his own memory. "Didn't she say something about just _finishing_ the shirt he ripped off her?"

Prophet nodded. "I think so, yeah. Here." He scanned the page quickly and then handed it to Mick. "I don't see anywhere where she says specifically that she made the shirt, just the comment about finishing it, but if they can get confirmation…."

"If it's a unique garment, that would go a long way," Coop said with a nod of his own. "And it's good leverage. If they can find the remains, even without DNA his lawyer will have a harder time explaining something like that than something from a local department store." He reached out to start collecting the papers they'd scattered around the table. "Nice work. The police might have scared him with their visit, but we all know that serial rapists don't just _stop_, and after four months he's got to be getting anxious enough to start again." He shook his head. "I'll get the profile written up if you two want to take a break for lunch. We can start on the Watertown case when you get back; I still think the knife that the unsub used has to be a clue. Unless you've got a class today, Mick?"

"No classes on Thursdays, at least not for the next two weeks, but I've got to run or I won't have time to grab my things before the bus comes. The boxes I shipped came in, and I signed up for a slot today to get range quals over with." He'd thought about doing it earlier since there had been no way to know how long the strikes would hold up the airmail and he wasn't worried about his ability to adapt to one of the FBI standard rifles, but considering that he still had a list of classes to finish, there'd been no hurry. And, like most snipers, he preferred using his own weapon when he had a choice. As it turned out, he'd been lucky and it had only taken a week and a half for his boxes to arrive. "I'll be back afterwards, but I'm not sure exactly when that'll be."

"Want a ride over?" Prophet asked.

The offer was unexpected to say the least, and Mick glanced back at him. "You wouldn't mind?"

"Nah. I need to stop over there and check on some paperwork anyway."

"Then sure. Thanks." That would solve the problem of trying to look nonthreatening while carrying his guns on the bus, anyway. He didn't think it was illegal, at least not since Coop had got him all the appropriate paperwork, and it wasn't like most people would be able to tell what they were in their cases anyway, but to anyone who did know they'd be just a little conspicuous.

"Why don't you try and get your qual stuff finished this afternoon too?" Coop suggested, his eyes on Prophet. "I know you said the web courses were still offline, but that would get the last of what you have to do at the academy out of the way."

"Yeah, but I don't want to use up his slot."

Mick snorted. "It won't take me that long to get signed off." He wasn't sure how good Prophet was, but if he was at least competent—and if he wasn't, Coop wouldn't have suggested it—they'd both be able to finish well within the allotted time.

"Guess I'll give it a shot, then."

"That's a horrible pun, mate."

Prophet tilted his head, frowning for a second, and then it morphed into a quick grin, and he grabbed his keys off his desk. "You said you needed to stop by your place?"

"Yeah. It's just down the street."

When they reached the Bureau, Prophet let him off by the range and then left to do whatever it was that he needed to get done, and Mick signed in quickly and then went to get set up. He was a little early since he hadn't had to take the bus, and whoever was supposed to be checking people off didn't seem to be around yet, so Mick took his time. FBI standard rifle qualification required shorter distance shooting than Mick usually practiced at—the next time they had one of their HRT sniper classes he'd show up long enough to get all the right boxes checked for that, but for now he just had to get the standard out of the way to be cleared for field work—but he reset his scope and fired off a ranging shot anyway just to make sure that no issues had come up in transit. The shot was clean, and after taking another quick look around to make sure that whoever was supposed to sign him off hadn't put in an appearance yet, he flipped the safety back on and shifted around to lean against the shooting wall to wait.

Prophet was back before anyone else showed up, carrying one of the FBI standard carbines probably checked out from the weapons desk since Mick hadn't seen it in his car earlier, and he took the lane beside Mick's with a nod.

For lack of anything better to do, Mick watched as he got set up. His movements were sure enough as he put his safety gear on, put the weapon together, and chambered the first round. He wasn't as quick about it as Mick would have been, but then, not many people were. And his cluster of practice shots was decent. Or at least tolerable. His elevation looked fine, but he seemed to have a habit of pulling slightly left, and he wasn't doing a very good job of compensating for it. Not by Mick's standards, anyway, although he'd probably still qualify.

"Mind if I make a suggestion?" Mick asked as Prophet released the rifle and rolled his shoulder. He wasn't sure how Prophet would take his offer…he never seemed to mind when Mick disagreed with one of his profile ideas, and with a good enough argument he was perfectly willing to change his mind, but that wasn't quite so directly skill-related.

Prophet looked over. "Please. I used hunt when I was a kid, but it's been a good twenty years since the last time I went out."

That was almost more about him than Mick had learned in a week and a half, and since Prophet clearly didn't mind, he opened his mouth to suggest a slight change in position. Before he could say anything, though, a man cleared his throat behind them.

"We prefer that people who aren't qualified don't attempt to give advice. It cuts down on bad habits being passed along."

The man, presumably the person who was supposed to qualify him given the clipboard in his hands and the badge clipped to his belt, was wearing a decidedly disapproving look, but it seemed as much directed at Prophet as Mick. It didn't make a lot of sense to Mick since he'd been the one to make the offer—and he could understand the reasoning even if it wasn't an issue in his case—but Prophet didn't seem to notice so he settled for a shrug. "Suppose I'd best get to that, then."

Prophet shifted back, gesturing the instructor forward to take his place, and Mick nodded towards the targets.

"Would you prefer that I switched to a clean lane?"

The man narrowed his eyes, glancing down Prophet's scope, and then he gave Mick an odd look. "No, that should be fine, but I know your name hasn't been on the sign-in sheet before. Most people take more than one practice shot."

"Don't need it." Especially at this range, and hell, in the field even one ranging shot had been a rare luxury. Mick ignored the man's disbelieving expression and pulled his rifle back against his shoulder. "Going hot." Two minutes later and there was a slightly dumbstruck instructor heading back towards the office and the appropriate signature on Mick's paperwork. He glanced over at Prophet even as he began to disassemble his rifle. "Think I ought to have mentioned that I was a sniper?"

The full grin that split Prophet's face was as unexpected as the hand that slapped his shoulder lightly, and he found himself grinning in return. "So you had a suggestion?" Prophet asked.


	4. Prophet: Breaking Ice

_Thanks to everyone who has been reading and foxfire222 for reviewing._

* * *

A sniper. Prophet shook his head, his lips still twitching. At least now Mick's comment about bringing his own guns to get range qualified made sense, although the fact that he'd done just that and with a rifle that was obviously not any kind of standard issue should probably have tipped him off earlier. But damn but the shocked look on the range instructor's face had been funny. Not that the guy wouldn't have seen those kinds of shots made before, obviously there were snipers at the FBI too, but a total stranger coming in and doing it with only one practice shot couldn't be a normal occurrence. Okay, yeah, the fact that it was that _particular_ range instructor had probably increased his amusement a little more than was strictly necessary—he did his best to be a good man, but nobody was going to be nominating him for sainthood any time soon, and he didn't mind admitting it—but it had still been worth a laugh.

"May I?" Mick asked, gesturing at the rifle he'd checked out.

"Be my guest."

Mick slipped into Prophet's seat, resetting the rifle and firing off a shot, and then he checked the target quickly before moving back to his own seat. "Try again."

Prophet sat back down took another shot, but it hit slightly to the left the same as all the rest. Mick's shot was identifiable enough for the simple fact that he'd blow out the target dead center.

"Still off, yeah?" Mick asked, although it seemed to be more comment than question. "Try this. Move this arm back a little…."

Mick tapped his elbow lightly, and Prophet allowed him to change his position and grip around slightly. He'd be the first to admit that while he was pretty solid with a handgun or a shotgun—the handgun after a decent amount of work at one of the other ranges in town since he'd touched one exactly twice before Cooper had picked up his application, and the shotgun after a few practice runs since he hadn't been out after turkey in at least as long as deer—his long distance shooting could use a little work. The other range didn't have FBI-type rifles available for practice use, and while he'd come here a few times to work on it by himself and was probably good enough to qualify, he wasn't about to refuse tips from someone who obviously knew exactly what he was doing.

"Your aim is fine, but you're pulling a bit left," Mick continued. "If you'd been doing this regularly for ten years I'd say just figure out how much to the right you need to aim to compensate, but if you're just getting started again, you might as well correct for it properly."

"And this will do that?" The new position felt a little awkward, but if it worked, he could learn to live with it.

"Might need a little more adjustment, but it'll be closer."

They ended up spending most of the allotted time getting him set up correctly and able to find the position again on his own…it meant that they had to hurry through the handgun and shotgun quals after he'd finally gotten signed off, but neither took long, and Prophet, at least, was glad to have them all out of the way. He'd have said that the same was true for Mick, but the grimace on his face as he cleaned the shotgun afterward said otherwise.

"What's wrong?" Prophet asked after a minute. Despite the fact that he didn't seem to own a shotgun and had checked one out from the range desk the same as Prophet, Mick had still topped out the scores, so it couldn't be that.

"Hm?" Mick shook his head. "Oh. Just don't care much for these things."

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "They're sloppy. They have their uses, I suppose, but give me a chance and I can do the same thing with one bullet and a lot less lead."

"Fair enough." True enough, too, obviously.

The range instructor scowled at him as they went up to return the shotguns, but Prophet ignored him. Now that he had the right signatures on his paperwork, the man couldn't actually do anything except annoy him. It had been a good day so far, all things considered: they'd managed to pin down a good lead for the detectives in Baltimore, the bitch of paperwork had been forced to admit that everything was—finally, and despite her best efforts—in order for him, his quals were done, and he'd gotten some useful tips for rifle shooting.

"Didn't mean to piss him off that much," Mick murmured quietly as they walked away. "I mean, it's not like I told him that I _wasn't_ a sniper."

"It's not you." Mick looked over, and Prophet shrugged. "He made it pretty clear that he wasn't happy with the idea of helping an ex-con improve his aim the first time that I stopped in for help so I'm guessing he's even less thrilled now that I'm finally qualified." He winced slightly. "Although now that I think about it, he might not be real happy with you either given that you were helping me. Sorry about that." It was one thing to take trouble on himself, he hadn't exactly gone into this blind, and Cooper had to have known that there might be issues when he pulled Prophet's application out of the 'hell no' pile, but dragging someone else into it was a different issue.

"Don't be. You'd have qualified either way, but it'd be bloody stupid to put somebody in the field who's not as good as he could be." He glanced back at the desk and then shook his head. "Especially since we're supposed to be on the same team. If we're out in the field and need long distance shooting, I'd rather you knew what you were about."

"Call me crazy, but from what I just saw, if we're out in the field and need long distance shooting, the smartest thing that I could do would be stay out of your way," Prophet pointed out.

"Well, there is that."

Prophet felt his smile return at Mick's cocky grin. He was pretty good at reading people—he'd had to be—and unless Mick was a way better liar than he acted, he meant what he'd said. Prophet tilted his head. "Want to grab lunch before we head back to the gym?" It was a good hour after he usually ate, and he was getting hungry, but he wasn't sure if Mick would accept or not. Up until an hour ago Prophet would have thought not, but he was starting to wonder if the defensive streak he'd never quite managed to quash had put his back up when it didn't need to be.

Mick hadn't exactly been the friendliest the first time they'd met, or the first time they'd officially met, anyway, but then again, he'd also been on his second day in a totally new place at the time. Prophet had started over more than once and could understand him feeling a little off-balance. If he was being honest, he could have been friendlier too…if Mick hadn't been in the audience for his battle with the bitch of paperwork the day before, he probably would have been. And the fact that they hadn't interacted much outside of work didn't necessarily mean anything either.

He knew that Mick and Cooper had gone to dinner a few times, but the one time that Mick had invited him along it had been the night that he'd promised Rosa that he'd get her car fixed so he'd had to decline, and the offer hadn't been repeated. Mick and Cooper _were_ old friends, though, and it was quite possible that they'd just wanted to spend some time getting caught up without a relative stranger getting in the way. After all, it wasn't like he and Mick didn't work well enough together. Today wasn't the first time that one of them had been able to piggyback on the other's thoughts for a profile.

"Sure," Mick agreed easily enough. "FBI cafeteria, or do you know somewhere else?"

"The bar by the gym has a decent lunch spread, if you haven't tried it."

Mick grimaced.

"What?"

"I'd rather not. I don't think that they even wash their glasses."

"What?" Prophet repeated. "I've never noticed a problem." He might have grown up back of beyond and would still pick a run-down bar over a fancy nightclub any day of the week, but it had been a few years since he'd been willing to overlook dirt in his food.

"I pass it every night on my way home, and I ended up stopping by one night." He shook his head. "I won't be doing that again."

Prophet's frown deepened as he tried to figure out how Mick managed to pass the bar on his way home when his apartment was in the opposite direction when the obvious occurred to him. "Wait, you're talking about that dive on Fifth, aren't you?" It was his turn to grimace. "Man, tell me you didn't eat anything from there. The health department has been in and out since before I started; Cooper and I have a bet going on when they'll close it down for good."

"You're serious?" He shook his head. "I wish I'd known that earlier. Although no, I didn't eat. Seeing the dirt in my drink was enough for me." Another shake. "Where are you talking about, then, about if not there?"

"There's a little place across the street from the _back_ door of the gym that has good food. And, for the record, clean dishes. If you've ever looked out the far window in Cooper's office, you've probably seen it, although I guess it doesn't look like much from the outside."

"That sounds good, then. I could use a few more options for food in the neighborhood."

"They did kind of stick those temp apartments in an odd part of town." Budget reasons, probably, but aside from the gym and a few awkwardly placed mid-rises like the one the FBI kept apartments in, it was a pretty industrial-type area.

"No joke." He climbed into the car, buckling his seatbelt quickly. "So what are the bets for closing that pub? Room for a third to get in?"

Prophet grinned. "The bet's not much, just lunch. From anywhere but there. Cooper says they've got a good six months left, given the bureaucracy involved with shutting a place down, but last time I walked past I saw a couple of rats eating at their own table so I don't give it more than two. Feel free to jump in if you like one of the other options."

"I didn't need to know about the rats either, mate. But I'll call it three since they still had a good dozen people eating there when I walked out. Poor bastards."

* * *

"Damn it." Prophet sighed and dug through his bag for a third time, but he must have left his good glove and cleats in his other workout bag, which meant that they were still down at the gym. Well, at least he'd noticed before the game, and he had plenty of time to get back over there and pick them up.

The gym was mostly deserted except for a half-filled kids' karate class, and he nodded to their teacher and then started to cut around the mats for the locker room when he caught sight of a familiar figure laying into one of the punching bags. "Hey," he greeted, detouring over and stopping a few feet off to one side. "Didn't figure I'd see you here on a Saturday."

Mick's head jerked around, and it took a moment for the surprise on his face to fade. "Hey," he returned. "What are you doing here?"

"Just needed to pick up some gear I forgot." He gestured at the punching bag. "Bad morning?"

"Dull morning, more like." Mick took a few steps back and began to stretch out his arms. "I was trying to get some reading done for the procedural law class—starts Monday; lucky me—but there's only so much of that that I can stand before I need to get out and do something. I either do this," he gestured at the punching bag, "or I let the kids use me for target practice. I'll tell you, man, eight year olds have some sharp elbows."

Prophet grinned. He hadn't really thought about it until Mick had mentioned it last week, but there really wasn't much to do in the general vicinity of the gym. And since things had loosened up considerably between the two of them since then, he now knew for sure that Mick didn't have a car and found the bus schedule in general and the weekend bus schedule in particular, horrendous. His word, not Prophet's, although Prophet didn't doubt him. "Do you like baseball?" Prophet asked after a moment.

A frown crossed Mick's face. "American baseball? That's the one where you hit the ball and the flat, square things are used for bases, right? I don't know much about it. Why?"

The fact that he didn't know much about it was pretty obvious from his description, but he hadn't said that he hated it so Prophet kept going. "I play in a rec league on the weekends for a few months out of the year. My team has a game in half an hour or so, and if you're bored, we can always use an extra person. Save recruiting some random stranger from the bleachers when it turns out that someone can't make it, because between vacations and kids' stuff and whatever else, there's _always_ someone who can't make it."

"You sure it'd be okay? I mean, I wasn't joking about not knowing how to play."

It wasn't a 'no,' in fact, from the look on Mick's face, he was more than a little tempted, and Prophet shrugged. "Sure. I mean, it is a little more involved than 'hit the ball and run around the bases'—and yes, they are the flat, square things—but it's not rocket science. If you want to try, I've got a spare glove you can borrow, and one of us can explain things as we go."

"I'm not likely to be any good," he said after a minute.

"That's probably just as well. I'm not sure who we're playing this week, but they're already going to rag on us for having a ringer if we've got someone under thirty on the field. They'd really give us hell if it was someone good under thirty." That was stretching things a little…not that most of the players in the league weren't over thirty, hell, he was pretty much in the middle of the pack, but he wasn't the only one who'd grown up with the sport, and there were a half a dozen guys who'd played in college and one who'd made the minors way back when. It wasn't the most competitive league in the city by any stretch of the imagination, though; they played hard, but they had just as much fun harassing each other, and even if Mick never managed to get a glove or a bat on the ball, he wouldn't come in for more than some good natured teasing. _He_ might get more, but it wouldn't be the first time that one of them had brought along friend who wasn't so great.

Mick smiled quickly. "Sure, then. Thanks."


	5. Mick: Settling In

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley and foxfire222 for reviewing._

* * *

"Are you sure you're all right?" Mick asked.

Prophet nodded, rolling his shoulder one last time. "I will be. Really should have relayed that last throw through third, though."

"The first baseman probably would have appreciated that. You didn't tell me when we got here that your own team ducked when you threw to them."

"They do not."

Mick grinned. They didn't, actually, but he'd figured out quickly that when Prophet decided to put his arm behind a throw, catching the ball was more a matter of self-defense than skill.

"Want to get food?" Prophet asked. "There's a pizza place down the block, and I'm starved."

"Sounds good." His stomach was starting to complain too, and he didn't have much at his place except for sandwich supplies. Mick matched Prophet's pace easily enough as he turned away from the field. "Thanks for inviting me along. That was fun." Especially considering that he'd had no idea real how to play the game a few hours ago. Oh, Prophet had been lying through his teeth when he'd implied that his team wasn't very good—they might be older than Mick for the most part, but they all knew the game forward and backward, and Prophet wasn't the only one with a hell of an arm—but they'd included him cheerfully enough even when it had been obvious that he had no clue what he was doing. And so had the team for the second game who'd grabbed him and Prophet as they were headed out of the dugout and asked them to sub. They'd obviously been more interested in Prophet, not really a surprise since at least a couple of them knew him, but they'd been willing enough to put Mick on the field too.

Prophet shook his head. "No problem. I know what it's like when you're in a new place and don't know anybody. Besides, for someone who has to be told which way to throw the ball—"

"Hey, now," Mick interrupted. Okay, yeah, there had been one or two 'The blue shirt! Throw the ball to the guy in the blue shirt! No, no, the _other_ guy in the blue shirt!' instances, but once the basics had been explained, he'd done okay. He could definitely hit the ball as hard as any of them, even if he hadn't figured out how to put it where he wanted to yet.

"You're not half bad," Prophet finished with a grin. "If you want to play again next weekend, just let me know."

Mick nodded, and then silence fell as they each grabbed a few slices at the counter and settled in to eat. It was a comfortable enough silence, though…he'd noticed that Prophet wasn't one to talk when he didn't have something to say, and while 'something to say' was sometimes just joking around, Mick was starting to suspect that the reserve he'd originally shown had more to do with general reticence around strangers than actual unfriendliness. And Mick had been embarrassed enough about having made an idiot of himself in front of a bunch of his new colleagues that he hadn't started out being particularly friendly himself, which probably hadn't helped. "Thanks for keeping shut about the whole eraser thing," he said as he finished his last slice. "Was kind of a crappy way to start at the FBI."

"Hm?" Prophet frowned for a minute, and then an easy grin returned. "No worries, man. Not that it wasn't funny, but aside from the fact that you looked pretty out of it, I managed to get myself fired from one job a shift and a half in thanks to a similar mix-up, and there ain't even an ocean between where I'm from and where that happened."

Mick shifted around to put his back against the wall, nodding his thanks to the waiter who dropped off another beer, although Prophet waved him off when he gestured at Prophet's half-empty glass. "You're right about me being out of it, it was the plane trip from hell—well, the plane trips from hell—to get here, and then I had about two minutes to rest before I had to start on the paperwork. But what happened to you?"

Prophet shrugged and took a sip. "If someone said 'I don't care to' to you if you asked them to do something, what would you figure that they meant?"

"That they didn't want to do whatever it was. What else would it mean?"

"Well, where I'm from—down south, if you hadn't noticed—it happens to mean 'I don't mind.' Now, I think that's the _only_ place on the planet that it means that, and I've since discovered that it's not even common across the entire southern US, but…." He shrugged again. "I don't know. Back where I grew up, that's just what you said."

"You're serious?" Mick had realized that Prophet's drawl was an accent in its own right, although he wouldn't have been able to place it on his own, but that seemed like a totally backwards translation.

"Unfortunately. I was…well, it was not too long after I left home so I would have been about sixteen. I'd been running the rail lines for a couple months, but things dried up, and I ended up getting a job shifting freight just to pay for food and a bunk and whatever. Was maybe halfway into my second shift when the supervisor asked me to switch bays, and I shrugged and said I didn't care to. I mean, what did it matter to me which side of the line I was working? Except then the next thing I knew, he was up in my face." Another shake. "I didn't have the greatest control over my temper back then, and considering that as far as I knew he was yelling at me for saying that I'd do exactly what he wanted, I started yelling right back. I'm pretty sure that he took the first swing, but I sure as hell didn't walk away, and…yeah, shortest job tenure ever." He shot Mick a wry smile. "And the really sad part is that it was a good six months before I figured out what had happened. Up until somebody else warned me that nobody was going to have a clue what I meant if I used that phrase up north, I just figured that the guy had been a little bit nuts."

Mick's grin widened.

"Yeah, laugh it up." Prophet drained his glass. "I ended up having to banish that phrase from my vocabulary, which turned out to be a lot harder than you'd think."

"Trust me when I say that 'rubber' is going, especially on this side of the pond." He mimicked Prophet's actions and downed the last of his beer as well. "Guess I'd better get back to my flat, though, if you wouldn't mind dropping me off. Really did want to make it through the first couple chapters of that damn book before class on Monday."

"The procedural law class, you said?" Prophet pushed himself to his feet. "I think I tested through that one, but from what I heard, the guy that teaches it is named Baker, and _he_ pretty much sleeps through it."

* * *

"Man, what does that even mean?" Mick refrained from banging his forehead on his desk mostly by force of will. He was a sniper and a criminologist and a soon-to-be FBI SSA, not a lawyer.

"What's wrong?"

He glanced up to see Prophet in the doorway.

"This is not English. I'm not sure what language it _is_, but I speak English, and this is not it." Today had been the second procedural law class, and he'd grabbed an early lunch with a couple of the other FBI recruits before catching the bus to the gym. Coop and Prophet had both been out when he'd arrived, so he'd taken the opportunity to get started on the next chapter…the plan had been to get ahead, not get a pounding headache, but that wasn't quite working out.

Prophet ambled over, turning the book towards him when Mick nodded, and then he shook his head. "For what it's worth, I don't think we're likely to run into too many cases involving inheritance law."

"Yeah, maybe not, but we've got the first test coming up in a week or two, and it's going to kick my arse." He sighed and then looked back up at Prophet. "Where's Coop? I figured you two had gone to lunch."

"We did, but he has a meeting with the director and deputy director and who knows who else this afternoon and won't be back until afterwards."

"As in the director of the FBI? That doesn't sound good."

Prophet snorted. "To make a long story short, the deputy director is a little annoyed that Cooper is set up to report directly to the director rather than going through her. And by 'a little annoyed,' I mean spitting mad. It's nothing new, I mean, she's been harping on it since before I got here—hell, she dropped by the gym one day and spent ten minutes ranting at me about it, and damned if I know why she thought I had any influence on anything—but from what Cooper said, her current argument is that since the team is nominally part of the BAU, all Red Cell operations should require her approval for 'budgetary reasons.'" Prophet marked out the quotes in the air. "The meeting starts at one."

"Oh, Coop's got to be loving that. The guy's practically allergic to bureaucracy."

"I noticed." He shook his head. "I'm debating whether I want to be here when he gets back because he's going to want to hit something, and his idea of sparring is not mine."

Mick groaned. "Didn't even think about that. Not that I wouldn't mind hitting something after spending the morning on this crap," he waved a hand at his book, "but…." He knew some Kali, sure, Coop was the one who'd taught him, but being on the receiving end of Coop working off steam was never a fun experience. Unfortunately, since he already spent good chunks of the week sitting through classes at the FBI, he couldn't really justify leaving the gym early. "Do you spar otherwise?" he asked after a minute. "If he wants to clobber someone, we might as well get warmed up first."

"Depends. Will that involve _you_ hitting me over the head with sticks?"

He grinned. "Nah. I mean, I know the style, but it's not what I usually use."

"Then sure, I'm game. Give me a minute to make a call up to Watertown, and then I'll get changed."

As it turned out, they were surprisingly evenly matched. Mick probably had more actual skill thanks to his time with the SAS, but Prophet knew some tricks that he'd never seen before, and while Mick was marginally faster, Prophet had him beat when it came to sheer muscle mass. They spent awhile trading points, and then Prophet suddenly twisted aside and gave him a light shove, and Mick realized that Coop had somehow entered the gym without him noticing. He barely had time to shoot a grinning Prophet a glare and grab the false knife Coop tossed him out of the air before Coop was on him.

Kali was an aggressive art anyway, that was its entire focus, but the meeting must have been especially frustrating because Coop was going as hard as he safely could in a match where neither of them was wearing padding. Eventually Mick was choked out—not literally, fortunately, although with Coop it was closer than he might have liked—and then it was his turn to grin as Coop signaled Prophet up.

Prophet's lack of technique was a lot more obvious as he scrambled to evade Coop's attacks rather than trying to turn them back on him as Mick would have done, although he got in a few good hits of his own, and watching him hook Coop's knife only to drop both weapons to the floor for the opportunity to elbow Coop in the nose was more than a little amusing. And in a real fight with real weight behind it he could have done a lot of damage, although the throw that Coop used to put Prophet on the floor a minute later would have done a whole lot worse.

Prophet slapped out before Coop could drop a knee into his chest—an intelligent move on his part—and then rolled clear, and Mick was readying himself to go again when Coop waved him off. "Thanks, guys. I needed that."

"That bad, hey?" Mick asked.

"I don't enjoy bureaucratic power plays, let's put it that way." He sighed. "Have we heard anything back on the Watertown case?"

"Still waiting for the coroner's office to fax us copies of the autopsy report from that mysterious hunting accident," Prophet said with a shake of his head. "I called them earlier, but apparently the fax machine is broken."

"Wait, _the_ fax machine?" Mick asked. They'd been working on the Watertown case on and off for the last week or two, and Coop had said that it was a small town, but he hadn't realized that it was one-fax-machine small.

"Yep."

"Wow."

"Not the word I used."

Mick grinned at Prophet's expression, and Coop shook his head. "And we're still waiting to see if search warrants come through in Bristol and Tylersville. All right, let's get cleaned up and then hit the stacks and see what pops out."

* * *

"Hey, you're working with that new experimental team, right? The one they're calling a Red Cell?"

"Hm?" Mick lifted his head to focus on the man who'd spoken. He and a couple others in his procedural law class had got together for dinner and to study for the exam tomorrow—one of only two, so he couldn't afford to do badly—and a few guys from the class before had been invited along for any help they could give. So far most of their 'help' had consisted of drinking a few pitchers of beer, but then again, alcohol was the only thing that Mick could see dragging _him_ back to this stuff after the tests were finished so he couldn't really blame them. This guy…Nathan something, Mick thought he'd been introduced as. Trailers? Trevors? Something like that, anyway. He nodded in response to the question. "Yeah, Sam Cooper's team."

"Surprised you're here; you guys seem to be getting out of everything else."

Mick shrugged. He'd heard a few mutters of that sort from one or two guys in his class who had previous law enforcement experience but weren't being allowed to comp out of classes, but since none of them had said anything to his face, he'd ignored them. And even though this guy had said something to him directly, he didn't see any reason to change his behavior. Especially given the tone.

"I mean, have you heard about that first guy he recruited? Simms?" the man pressed. "Rumor is that he spent like six years in prison. Nobody will say anything _officially_, of course, and somehow he was still allowed to join the FBI. And he did some extra testing to get out of classes too."

Mick shrugged again. He'd been told him about the prison time flat out, although not by Prophet, but he really hadn't thought much about it after the first couple days. Even if he hadn't liked Prophet, the fact that Coop trusted him would have been enough for Mick.

"It's ridiculous," the man continued, shaking his head. "I mean, how can you stand to work with someone like that?"

That was just pushing for gossip, and Mick didn't miss the curious looks from a few of the other recruits. "I like him," Mick said flatly. It was actually a little odd when he thought about it, although not for the reason that this guy seemed to think that it should be. He didn't really have any more in common with Prophet than he did with any of the FBI recruits that he'd met, minus the two from the US armed forces, anyway, and the age difference was actually greater, but Mick found himself a lot more at ease with him. "And he has been cleared to join the FBI," he added after a moment, "so whatever happened in his past, it's none of my business."

"You're braver than I am," the man continued to press, apparently not reading the warning in Mick's voice. "I mean, who knows what he's capable of. Prisons aren't exactly known for turning out upstanding citizens."

"Have you ever actually had a conversation with him?"

"What?"

"Have you ever actually had a conversation with him? Because I've had several. In fact, when I'm not in classes, I'm working on cold case profiles with him and Coop." And that wasn't even taking into account the times they'd grabbed food or the baseball games he'd played in the past two Saturdays. "I'm not worried."

Nathan-whatever curled his lip, and Mick shook his head and turned back to his book. He was still pretty damn sure that this exam was going to kick his arse, and he'd much rather spend his evening studying than dealing with gossip. Especially gossip about someone he was starting to consider a friend.


	6. Prophet: Settling In

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhaley for reviewing._

* * *

Thunder cracked overhead as Prophet was parking his car, and he grabbed the bag of sandwiches and hurried into the gym. Judging by the look of those clouds, there was a downpour on the way. Mick was seated at the center table scowling down into a textbook when he got to the office—apparently classes were over for the day—but he looked up when Prophet entered, and Prophet dug out a sandwich and tossed it over.

"Thanks," Mick said, setting it beside him. "Coop's in his office."

Prophet nodded and headed in that direction. The door opened at his light tap, but Cooper was on the phone, and Prophet handed over the second sandwich without saying anything. Cooper nodded in thanks, and Prophet stepped back out into the main area and shut the door behind him. "What's up? That looked kind of serious."

Mick shook his head. "I don't know who he's talking to, but he's been in there since I got here."

"Huh." Mick had yet to even open his sandwich, and Prophet slapped him on the arm lightly as he dropped down into the chair beside him. "Come on, take a break and eat something." The last sandwich in the bag was his, and he was more than ready for lunch.

"Can't. The last test is in a couple days, and this stuff…some of it's still gibberish as far as I'm concerned, but the parts I can understand are almost worse because it's almost but not quite the same thing I learned back home. I thought I had it down, but after what he went through today…." He waved a hand. "You said you never had to take this one?"

"Well, all the classes are required, but it's one of the ones that I tested out of," Prophet said with a shrug.

"How? Some kind of photographic memory or something, or is there just a really obvious trick that I'm missing? There's like 300 pages here, and that's not counting what we had to read for the _first_ half of the class. And, of course, the second test just has to be comprehensive despite the fact that we've only got two hours for it. At this rate I'm going to be writing with both hands."

Prophet shrugged again. "No trick. The prison library had a ridiculous number of law books, and I had a lot of free time." He'd had to review a few things since that had been awhile back, but overall he hadn't thought that the test had been that bad.

"Damn. I don't suppose you've got some strange desire to sneak in and take the exam for me?"

"Right, because we look so much alike that no one would ever notice. Plus I don't think anybody's likely to mistake my accent for an English one."

"Welsh," Mick said with a shake of his head.

"What?"

"I'm from Wales, my accent is _Welsh_. Not English."

Prophet grinned. "Suppose I shouldn't ask if there's a difference."

"I'd hate to have to hit you when you were nice enough to bring me lunch."

His grin grew. "So what's giving you trouble?"

"Well, I figure I'll get the which-is-which sorted out eventually, and if I'm lucky it'll be in time for the exam. But the gibberish…the fact that it's all legal terms isn't helping, but there's also the fact that I'm not totally sure that their definitions for certain words are the same as mine. American English is ridiculous."

"Hey, man, if they're legal terms, you can't blame English. Legal definitions aren't the same as those of _any_ sane person. But if you want, I might be able to help."

Mick glanced up and then pushed the book towards him. "Please. I've got the worst of it marked with post-its." He paused. "Ignore the commentary on the post-its."

Prophet flipped back to the first marked page, but he'd just started to scan it—it looked like search and seizure qualifications—when Cooper emerged from his office.

"Guys, whatever you're doing, take a break. I need your eyes on this."

"New case?" Mick asked.

"Yes and no. We just got it, but there was a kidnapping in upper Michigan a little over three weeks ago. Emily Keady. At the time, the police thought it was custodial—the divorce was contentious, and the father lost visitation rights the month before when he pulled the girl from school and took her out of state for a week without informing the mother—but they just tracked the father down in North Dakota, and there's no sign of her."

"How old are we talking?" Mick asked. "If she's young enough, he could have dropped her off somewhere along the way and she wouldn't have been able to tell anyone."

"If she was in school, that means she's walking and talking," Prophet disagreed.

"She was eleven as of last week, and if the father is lying about not knowing anything, he's apparently doing a damn good job of it."

"It's been almost a month so if it _wasn't_ the father that took her…." Mick trailed off with a shake of his head.

Cooper nodded. "We all know the odds, but they asked us to take a look at the case anyway. They emailed what they have in their computers, but I'm afraid it won't be much."

Prophet grabbed his laptop off his desk, bringing up the unit email and putting it on the table so Mick could see what was coming in as well. Unfortunately, Cooper's suspicions turned out to be right. There was a school photo, the names of a couple relatives, a few comments from a counselor that the girl had been seeing—Emily missed her father, had acted out in school a few times, nothing real unusual for a child caught in the middle of a messy divorce—and not much else. "Doesn't even say where she was grabbed," he said after a moment, looking back up at Cooper.

"Because they don't know. Her mother got called in unexpectedly that Saturday morning to cover one of her coworker's shifts, and there was a miscommunication with the babysitter. When the police were finally called to the house that afternoon, they found the front door locked and no sign of forced entry, which was part of the reason they thought that she'd left willingly with her father. But none of her things were missing either so she could just as easily have gone outside herself and been taken from her yard, from the park down the block, from the street…."

"Most kids will have a favorite toy," Mick said after a minute. "And surely her father would have known that and grabbed it. It's weak, but it could point towards abduction."

"Unless her father told her that he was just taking her to lunch or something. A ten year old doesn't carry her stuffed bear everywhere, and he might not have wanted her getting suspicious." Prophet shook his head. "I'm assuming that the police are talking to the various relatives, but what do we know about the babysitter?"

"They started contacting precincts local to the relatives as soon as the father was located," Cooper said. "So far nothing. And according to the lead detective on the case, Mrs. Alma Addison is a seventy year old widow who's lived next door to the family since before Emily was born and was practically another grandparent. They cleared her almost immediately."

"So what was the miscommunication?" Mick asked.

"Like I said, the call to come into work was unexpected, and apparently Mrs. Keady called Mrs. Addison as she was headed out the door. That was just after seven-thirty. Mrs. Addison didn't realize that it was Saturday and assumed that Mrs. Keady would be dropping Emily off at school like she'd been doing for the last month, and instead of going over to the house immediately, she stayed home until quarter to four and then went down to the corner to meet Emily's school bus."

"But since it was Saturday, the bus never came," Prophet said.

"And that's when she realized her mistake and went to the house. When Emily wasn't there, she called Emily's mother, started calling her friends, and ended up calling the police."

"That's a better than eight hour window on top of the lack of any kind of location, and people's memories start getting fuzzy after a day or two," Mick said. "After almost a month…."

Cooper nodded. "I know. I'm flying to North Dakota to interview the father this afternoon, get my own read on him. I need the two of you working on this from here."

"Is this really everything they have?" Prophet asked, paging back through the emailed information. "There should at least be a _mention_ of the babysitter, even if she was cleared."

"That's everything they had on the computers," Cooper said. "The police did talk to some of the neighbors the day Emily disappeared, plus the interviews with the mother and babysitter and one or two others, but since they decided almost immediately that it was custodial, most of those notes just went into the archives."

Prophet snorted. "Because storing paper files is so much more efficient."

"Guess it saved them time typing things up. I did get a promise that they'd fax copies of everything our way, though, plus a copy of the report from the first time that the father took the girl. I gave you the number for that tech over at the FBI building, right?"

"Garcia, right? It's on my phone."

"Good. She's been working with Aaron Hotchner's team for a few years now, and I've heard good things. If you need anything the police can't get you, give her a call."

* * *

"There is _nothing_ here," Mick said with a sigh.

"I've noticed." They'd gone through all the interviews with the neighbors multiple times since the faxes had started arriving, but none of them were what he would call complete. For the most part they were just variations on 'Have you seen a man that looks like Mr. Keady in town recently?' and 'What about the green Chevy he drives?' He couldn't really blame the police because if he'd had the information that they'd had at the time, he'd have thought that it was custodial too, but right now it was making life difficult. "I'm hoping Cooper's having more luck."

"That makes two of us." Mick stretched, wincing at the audible pop from one shoulder. "Want to order a pizza or something? I'm getting hungry."

Prophet glanced down at his watch, and it was his turn to wince. "Is it really past eight? Man. Might as well, I guess, although I'm half-tempted to say call it a day and start fresh tomorrow because I'm not sure what going through these files yet again is going to accomplish. Can drop you off at your place if you want; it doesn't sound like that rain is letting up."

"I'll probably take you up on that, but let's stay until Coop calls. Maybe he'll have something new for us."

"Fair enough." It wasn't like he wouldn't keep thinking about the case if he went home anyway.

Mick pulled out his phone. "Anything you don't want on the pizza?"

"Nah, whatever's fine." The pizza arrived before Cooper's call, and Prophet discovered as he took a bite that he was a lot hungrier than he'd realized. Kids…kids always got to him.

"You know, maybe we're looking at this the wrong way." Mick said as he finished off his first slice.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I figure Coop would have called by now if he thought that the father had taken Emily."

"If only to tell us to focus on him," Prophet said with a nod.

"And if she was taken in a true stranger abduction, we've got no chance. Not just of figuring out who took her, but…."

'Of finding her remains,' Mick didn't say, but Prophet heard it anyway. And as much as he didn't like it, Mick was right. "I know. I asked Garcia to look for any similar cases in the region just in case, but so far she's turned up nothing. She was going to widen the search parameters, see if that gives us anything, but given the lack of detail in Emily's case, even if she does find something it probably won't do us any good."

"So let's assume that it's not a stranger abduction. I mean, on that, at least, the odds are in our favor. Let's look into everyone who wasn't a stranger."

"As in write down everyone she knew and check them off one by one?"

"Everyone she knew, everyone she had any contact with, all of that." He shrugged. "It's an idea."

Prophet nodded slowly. "Even if it'll take a while, right now we've got nothing _but_ time." Usually with child abductions the twenty-four hour window meant that narrowing down the suspect pool quickly was essential, but in this case they were already well past that deadline anyway. "Not to mention that it's a direction, which is more than we've had so far." He grabbed another piece of pizza and pushed himself out of his chair, grabbing a piece of chalk out of the chalkboard tray. "So we've got the mother, the father, the grandparents in…?"

"Cincinnati," Mick supplied. "And an aunt there too, plus another aunt and uncle in Springfield. Those are all maternal relatives, though; it looks like her father was an only child and his parents both passed away a few years back."

"Okay, so maybe we drop them down the list a little." Prophet put dashes by those names quickly. "We've got her teacher, Mrs. Babcock, whoever drives the school bus—"

"Any of her old teachers," Mick cut in. "Plus the school librarian, the principal, custodians, all of them."

"Right." Prophet added a generic 'teachers and school staff' quickly. "We can ask Garcia to get us names tomorrow. Then we've got her friends and their parents…we'll probably need her mother to help out with those names, and names from any clubs or activities that she was a part of. And we'll need to know all the neighbors."

"And babysitters," Mick added. "Not just Mrs. Addison but anyone who kept an eye on her."

He added both 'Mrs. Addison' and 'babysitters' for completeness and then frowned. "I wonder…." He trailed off, tapping the chalk against the board lightly. There was something there, if he could just get a handle on it. "You know, maybe that was the stressor."

"I'm not following."

"Well, she was ten, right? And a pretty normal ten year old from everything we've seen so far."

"Yeah. And?"

"Most ten year olds are allowed to walk to and from the bus stop by themselves, go to the park down the block alone, maybe even ride a bike over to a friend's house without a parent along. But then her father grabs her and disappears with her for a week, and all of a sudden her mother is driving her to school and she's got a babysitter meeting her at the bus stop."

"Right . After a scare like that, her mother probably didn't want her going _anywhere_ alone." Mick nodded slowly. "So if there had been someone she'd been interacting with casually on a regular basis, someone who fixated on her, and then suddenly she was never alone…you're right, I could see that being a trigger point. And let's say that Emily woke up when her mother went to work, but when Mrs. Addison never showed up she decided to enjoy some of the freedom that she hasn't had for a while."

"An active ten year old suddenly having to stay with her mother or a seventy-year old babysitter or whoever all of the time, she had to be feeling pretty cooped up," Prophet agreed.

"Maybe she didn't do anything unusual that day, didn't even go out of her comfort zone, but the unsub saw her out on her own for the first time in a month and took his chance," Mick finished.

"It would explain why there was no sign of disturbance at the house if she left on her own, anyway."

"Was her bike missing?"

"No. Oh, so, walking distance, good call."

Mick frowned. "We can't rule out her friends' parents—if she wasn't going to and from their houses on her own anymore, her being out alone one day might have been seen as the only chance to grab her—but unless she wasn't allowed to go to their houses at all, we can probably move them down on the list."

"Teachers and school staff too," Prophet said with a nod. "Especially since they'd actually have had an excuse to watch her _closer_ after her father grabbed her that first time. Hell, her mother probably asked them to do just that."

"But the school year was about to come to an end. They had what, two weeks left when she disappeared? That could be a stressor too."

"Good point." Prophet changed the dashes that he'd been putting beside those names to stars quickly. "Statistics say male offender, but if we're checking everyone, we should check everyone."

"Agreed. We should move the neighbors up on the list, though. They'd be people she might have stopped to chat with out on her own but was suddenly only meeting under supervision."

"And anyone she might have interacted with at the park." He winced. Neighbors were one thing, but 'park visitors' was a very vague entry to put on their list, especially since it needed a star.

"Unfortunately, who knows how many people go to that park," Mick said, echoing his thoughts. "And if a little girl walked off with someone she obviously knew with a smile on her face, who would have looked twice?" He sighed. "You know, this idea sounded a lot better when I first said it."

"Hey, don't knock it. At least we're working on _something_ now instead of flipping through files at random. And maybe we'll get lucky and it will turn out to be a small neighborhood park where all the names match those on the 'neighbors' list."

"Want to place a bet on that?" Mick shook his head. "But star 'babysitters,' too. If there was someone that her mother used regularly before the father's grab and then suddenly the lady next door was the only one she trusted, that could be an issue."

"Right." His phone rang before they could brainstorm further, and he pulled it out and put it to his ear. "Hey, Cooper. Yeah, we're both still at the gym. I'm going to put you on speaker."

"Any luck?" Mick asked as Prophet tabbed the speakers on and held the phone out.


	7. Mick: Working the Case

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley and GuiltyPleasuresAndDeadlySins for reviewing._

* * *

"Yes, ma'am." A pause. "No, ma'am."

Mick grinned at Prophet. As they'd suspected, Coop had agreed with the detective's assessment that the father was clean, but while he'd liked their theory, neither Mick nor Prophet was cleared for fieldwork yet so he was the only one who could go to Michigan to interface with the local detectives. Mick and Prophet were continuing to work from the gym which was skirting the line of 'fieldwork' pretty closely in Mick's opinion given that it was an active case, but since right now that consisted mostly of making phone calls and trying to complete the interviews that the police had started, he doubted that anyone was going to object. The school staff had originally been on Mick's list while Prophet handled the neighbors and friends that her father had been able to name, but while Mick had successfully spoken to four of Emily's former teachers and two members of the office staff, he'd given up and handed his phone over to Prophet after Principal Taylor had asked him to repeat himself for the third time before he even got past his introduction. So far from everything he'd heard from Prophet's end of the conversation, it was the most intelligent move he'd made all morning.

"Yes, ma'am."

Prophet's voice didn't change in the slightest as he flipped Mick off, and Mick choked back a full laugh. It didn't do much for Prophet's glare, but it was amusing as hell to listen to his perfectly calm, patient responses to whatever the woman was saying while watching his expression grow more and more exasperated.

"Would you excuse me for just one minute?" Prophet asked. "Thank you so much." He lowered the phone from his ear, covering it with one hand, and glared at Mick. "Seriously, there's a pond near the baseball fields, and come Saturday I got no problem sending you for a swim. Isn't there someone you should be talking to right now?"

"You're welcome to try," Mick returned with a grin. "But no, especially since you've got my phone."

"I—damn it."

Mick's grin widened. He could have used the FBI landline that had been put in at the gym, but he didn't have anyone left to call at this point. Principal Taylor had been the last person on the 'school' list, and of the ones he'd reached, none of them had been able to give him anything new to work with. Which wasn't really a surprise given the time that had passed and the fact that Emily hadn't even been at school the day that she'd disappeared. He hadn't sensed any deception from any of them either, although when it came to psychopaths seeming normal was their stock in trade so he wasn't crossing anyone's name off the list until an alibi was confirmed. He was going to have to try the ones he hadn't reached again later, and he knew that Prophet had a bunch to retry too since ten o'clock on a weekday meant that a lot of the neighbors hadn't been home, but unless this phone call yielded something or Coop called—he was going to do the interviews with the mother and Mrs. Addison and a few of the closest neighbors himself—they were running out of things to do. "Give me your phone, and I'll check back with Garcia," he said after a moment. Prophet had asked her to do full background checks on the neighbors and school staff earlier, and by now she might have something for them.

Prophet dug it out of his pocket and tossed it over. "I get the feeling we're going to need to put her on speed dial or something. But I don't suppose you've got any useful suggestions for how to convince this woman that despite being part of 'the government' I have no influence over the state of education in this country, do you? Because I'd really like to get our questions answered before lunch. Next Tuesday."

"Sorry, mate."

Prophet shook his head and then put the phone back to his ear. "Sorry about that. Thank you for waiting. Now, I'm sure you have better things to do than chat with me so if you wouldn't mind answering just a few ques—" He broke off, eyes closing as his free hand went to his forehead. "Yes, ma'am."

Mick snickered again as he pushed himself up from the table and headed for Coop's office, and something light and plastic-sounding bounced off the doorframe as he ducked inside. "Missed me," he called back.

"Thank you for calling the Office of Supreme Omniscience," a woman's voice said cheerfully a moment after Mick located Garcia's number. "How may I direct your call?"

"Hello, my name is Mick Rawson. I'm on Sam Cooper's team, but I don't think we've been introduced. I emailed you about aerial shots earlier?"

"Ah, that Mick Rawson. Penelope Garcia, at your service, so nice to have a voice to go with your name. But I have this number down as Prophet's phone…do I have that wrong?"

"No, but I'm borrowing it for the moment since he has mine. I think he asked you earlier about doing some background checks for us?"

"That he did, and if you will hold on, I will have the results pulled up in the blink of an—and there they are."

Mick smiled. "Thanks. What have you got?"

"The most crime-free neighborhood that I've seen since I started this job, actually, not that that's likely to help you much. It's been two years since anyone within a three-block radius of the address you gave me has even gotten a parking ticket. Now, I'm still cross-referencing listed owners with the full property records just to make sure that we aren't missing anyone, and further away than that and the names are still running through the computers, but so far nothing is popping out."

"What about the school employees? I talked to a few of the teachers, and Prophet's still on the phone with the principal, but so far it's been slow going."

"Background checks all came up totally clean for them too. Which is actually a relief for me, although again not much help for you, because you would be amazed at how many school districts just do _not_ do their homework. I did get those aerial shots that you wanted, though. Just sent them a few minutes ago."

"Thanks, love, that's a help. And could you possibly do one more thing for me?"

"Of course, how could I refuse that beautiful accent?"

Mick's smile grew and he shook his head. "If there are any shops in the area, could you send us the addresses and start background checks on the employees? Maybe she visited one to get a candy bar or something." He hadn't thought about it yesterday, but he was pretty sure that he'd been younger than ten when Mum had started letting him run down to the corner store on his own, and a local store was another place that Emily might have felt comfortable going.

"Will do."

Prophet had retrieved his pen and was scribbling something down as Mick re-entered the main office, and Mick moved his computer over to the center table and started it up. He liked aerials. They might not be quite as detailed as proper terrain maps, but a terrain map didn't always show sheds and trash cans and bits of daily life. From what he could tell from this map, though, he was looking at a pretty typical suburban neighborhood. Neat houses, neat lawns, neat roads, not much to see. He shook his head and sent the images to the printer. Being able to draw routes would give him a better sense of the locations.

"Well, that was more trouble than it was worth," Prophet muttered as he finally lowered the phone from his ear. "Anything?"

"So far the neighbors and school staff are clean; these are just the aerials I asked Garcia for. You finally got your answers?"

"Yeah. Mrs. Keady did ask her to keep a special eye on Emily, but since the playground is fenced and the kids are called out by bus number at the end of the day, all she did was tell the office staff that under no circumstances was her father allowed or take her out of class and if he showed up at the school they should call the police. Oh, and she passed the word on to the classroom teacher too. Don't suppose you got anything from her?"

"She's one of the ones that I haven't been able to reach yet," Mick said. "But I don't suppose we got amazingly lucky and the principal saw Emily the day that she disappeared? Or, you know, confessed to kidnapping her?"

"Sorry, no such luck. And she was sure that she hadn't noticed anything unusual about her behavior in the weeks leading up to it, either. And nothing in the way that she was talking made me think that she might be hiding anything." He rubbed his forehead and gave Mick a wry smile. "For what it's worth, she did mention that there was a teaching student from a local college rotating through different classrooms earlier this year, though. In theory the girl finished back in March, but I figure we should add her to the list."

Mick nodded and then handed Prophet's phone back as Prophet offered his.

"So what do the aerials show?"

Mick grabbed them off the printer and a pen off his desk, spreading them out on the table. "Well, here's Emily's house." He circled it quickly. "And this would be Mrs. Addison's."

"That must be the park." Prophet tapped the mass of green at the end of the street lightly. "It isn't very big; maybe it is just a neighborhood park."

"The bus stop—just for the school bus, no commercial routes run through the neighborhood—was supposed to be on the far corner." Mick marked that quickly. "And a little bit of good news, anyway."

"What?"

"I asked Garcia to look into any local stores that Emily might have visited, but the closest one I'm seeing is across this highway here, and somehow I doubt that she was supposed to cross it on her own."

Prophet nodded. "I'll ask Coop to check with her mother to make sure, but I bet you're right, especially since I'm not seeing anything like a light or a crosswalk anywhere close. And there's not much off in this direction besides more houses."

"We've got addresses for a couple of the friends…okay, here's one right here." Mick grabbed a different colored pen to mark that house. "If we assume that she left her house with some kind of destination in mind, the paths to her friend's houses and that park seem like good routes to concentrate on."

"Joy, more blind neighbors to call."

"Not like we wouldn't be doing it anyway."

* * *

"This is making my head hurt," Mick said, rubbing his forehead as the recording of Coop's interview with the mother cut off. They'd listened to the file three times, but despite Coop's best efforts to wring out every detail possible, there just wasn't much to work with. Mrs. Keady had left for work just after seven-thirty, had spoken to Mrs. Addison right before she'd left, hadn't noticed anyone, including any of the neighbors, on the street on her way out or remembered passing any vehicles leaving the neighborhood. Couldn't remember anyone paying any particular attention to Emily at any point before her disappearance. About the only thing she had been able to tell them—between hysterics, which, while completely understandable, were not at all helpful—was that she'd woken Emily up to say goodbye before she'd left, but that had only confirmed that they had a better than eight-hour abduction window to deal with.

"Yours and mine both, brother." Prophet shook his head. "I'm going to take a break and call Garcia back before she takes off for the night, see if her digging on the mysterious vacation family turned up anything."

"Sounds good. I'll start on Mrs. Addison again." Coop had done her interview after Mrs. Keady's and they'd only been through it once so far, but he wasn't really expecting a second listen to turn up anything new.

They'd managed to get a few more of their phone calls completed as the day went on, but so far none of them had been particularly useful. The weeks since the abduction had dulled everyone's recollections, and there had been so many maybes and probablys and that sort of thing that it had been hard to nail down any solid facts. Well, they had found one questionable thing: when Prophet had asked one neighbor about any unusual activity using the excuse that sometimes people see things and don't realize that it means anything especially if they're focused on something else out of their normal routine, she remembered that another neighbor family on the other side of the street with a son a few years younger than Emily had left on vacation the day of Emily's disappearance. Neither he nor Prophet could come up with a reason why someone would go on vacation two weeks _before_ the end of the school year so if Garcia couldn't get them anything, both were agreed that they'd turn the name over to Coop to look at more closely. And they had managed to get legitimate alibis for a few other people and crossed those names off their list so he couldn't say that there was no progress being made. But there were just so many names.

Prophet pushed himself up from the table, pulling out his phone, while Mick dragged his computer around and began replaying Coop's interview with the babysitter. There had to be _something_ here.

As he'd expected, nothing really jumped out as Mrs. Addison spoke. She'd been feeding her babies—the furry kind—when Emily's mother had called and had told her that it would be no trouble to keep an eye on Emily. After all, Emily was such a little dear. She spent a few minutes extolling Emily's virtues before Coop got her back on track, and then a good ten more were spent on her berating herself for not realizing that it was Saturday and going over immediately. Again, Mick could understand the upset since he couldn't even imagine how he'd feel in her situation, but it again took Coop some time to get her back to describing her day.

Unfortunately, even when he did, there weren't many more details in her recollections than there had been in Mrs. Keady's. After hanging up, she'd watched some television, done a little gardening—no, she wasn't sure what time she'd gone outside, and she'd spent the whole time working in her fenced-in backyard so even if it had been during that time period that Emily had left her house she wouldn't have seen her—wrote a letter to her granddaughter after lunch, and then relaxed and watched some television movie before going to meet Emily's bus. She hadn't seen anything unusual out any of her windows, couldn't remember hearing any traffic while working in her garden, didn't think her dogs had barked at anyone, and hadn't had her movie interrupted by anything. It was consistent with Emily having left the house on her own rather than being taken by force, but since they were going on that theory _anyway_….

"A movie." Mick frowned and reran that statement again.

"You got something?" Prophet asked, dropping back down into his chair.

"I'm not sure. How does American television work?"

Prophet gave him an odd look and then shrugged. "Like most everyone else's televisions, I'd guess. I mean, they're all made in the same places anyway."

Mick shook his head. He wasn't being very clear about this, but then again, it wasn't very clear to him yet either. "No, I meant is it the same programming every day? Like back home they play news programs in the morning during the week but children's programming in the morning on the weekends." There was a television in his flat, but he'd only turned it on a few times and then mostly for noise. He was almost certain that he'd heard 'weekend movies' being advertised, but he just hadn't been paying that much attention.

"Saturday morning cartoons, right, it's the same here," Prophet said with a nod. "And there's usually some church stuff on on Sundays. Most channels do have different weekday and weekend lineups." He paused and then nodded, clearly catching up with Mick's line of thought. "So if Mrs. Addison was watching television in the morning and again in the afternoon, why didn't she notice that it was Saturday and not Friday way before it was time to meet Emily's bus?"

Mick nodded in return. "It could be that whatever channel she watches does play the same thing all week, though." Again, not that he'd watched much, but the list of channels in his flat was three pages long so there was bound to be some variation.

"Or if she watches enough television, it might all just blur together. Still, it does seem a little odd."

"Think it's worth mentioning to Coop?" His first inclination was no since as far as potential leads went, it was less than paper thin, but it wasn't like they'd found much else.

Prophet rocked a hand. "Think we'd better do a little more digging ourselves first. Although, another odd fact: according to Garcia Mrs. Addison is actually one of two names on the tax records for that property. Her son is listed too, and he's not nearly as squeaky clean as the rest of the neighborhood. Nothing violent, identity theft and fraud for the most part—he did a little time down in Kentucky a few years back for check kiting, and his wife is in the process of divorcing him over a sports car he tried to buy in their kid's name—but…." He shrugged.

"Hm." That was just about as thin as what Mick had come up with, especially if the man didn't even live in the area, but, again, it wasn't like they'd found any more promising leads to look into yet. "What about the vacationing family, did she get anything on them?"

"Not on vacation, at a funeral in Utah. Credit card records confirm it."

Well, that was a solid enough alibi. But at least it was another couple names to cross off their list. He frowned. "How did Garcia get their credit card records?"

"I didn't ask."

Mick grinned. "I think I'm going to like her."


	8. Prophet: Working the Case

_Thanks to everyone who has been reading._

* * *

Prophet greeted Mick with a nod as the door to the office opened, most of his attention still on the woman on the other end of the line. Who was currently speaking at a volume that had him holding the phone a good six inches from his ear.

"—six foot two with a goatee so I can't imagine why they'd let him sign as _Lydia_!" she continued.

Mick's eyes widened slightly, her declaration clearly audible to him too, and Prophet shook his head before Mick could say anything, moving the phone back to his mouth. "I understand your frustration." And he could, actually, in this case. "But are you sure that you have no idea where he is now? Or where he might have been in the past few weeks? Maybe he went to visit relatives?"

"I guess he could have gone to visit his mother—she still lives up in Michigan somewhere, I think—but like I told the police, I really don't know. Which is lucky for him, let me tell you, because if I get my hands on him…." She left the threat unspecified, but given her tone, Prophet didn't have too much trouble filling in the blanks. "I swear, I'm never letting that man near Lydia again. God only knows what else he'd try."

Her voice had risen again, and Prophet automatically made sure that his tone was even and sympathetic. "It must be a very difficult situation for you. But I won't take up any more of your time right now. Thank you for speaking to me, and please give me a call if you should hear from him."

She agreed, and then the line cut off and he lowered the phone from his ear. "Ouch. My ears are going to be ringing for the rest of the day."

"Who was that?" Mick asked.

"The soon to be _ex_ Mrs. Addison. Not the babysitter, her son's wife. I talked to Mrs. Addison the babysitter for a little while earlier, and her answers…." He shook his head. "They were bugging me. Figured I'd at least check on the whereabouts of the other legal owner of that house."

"And no luck, obviously." Mick grinned slightly. "Although I think I'm glad that it was you and not me talking to her because I've never been much good at calming people down, and I don't think I've heard a woman that angry since I accidentally called Karen Carla."

"Oh, that's nice. And here's to anger management classes, I guess." And the court mandate that had forced him to attend them, as little as he'd appreciated it at the time. They hadn't actually done much for him—sure, they'd taught him a some tricks for dealing with minor annoyances, but the few things that _really_ set him off still set him off and the best he could manage was locking down his temper before he did something bad afterwards—but he had learned a thing or two about dealing with other angry people. He leaned back in his chair. "So how'd your test go?" He knew that Mick had been debating asking for an extension given that they were in the middle of a case and he hadn't exactly had time to study, but since they hadn't come up with any new pressing leads last night, he'd decided to go in this morning and give it a try.

Mick groaned and dropped down into the chair across from Prophet. "Don't remind me. I won't know my official score until the instructor runs it through the machine, but considering that he already told me that I can schedule a retest anytime in the next three weeks, I'm not holding out a lot of hope." He shook his head. "Damn twisty questions. By the end of it I was half convinced that I'd spelled my own name wrong."

"Sorry, man. Remind me after we finish up for the day, and I'll buy you a drink."

"Thanks. I could use it." He lifted the supermarket bag he'd brought with him onto the table. "You good with a chicken salad sandwich for lunch? They were out of regular chicken, but I'll swap you for my ham if you'd rather."

"Either's fine." He'd never been much of a picky eater.

Mick tossed one of the sandwiches over. "So what did babysitter Mrs. Addison have to say that bothered you?"

"It was more what she didn't have to say. I called her earlier to ask exactly what she'd been watching on television that day—told her it was just procedure, that we were trying to pin down a timeline for when Emily might have left the house—and she insisted that it was just her normal news show in the morning with the usual anchors and everything. I checked, and even those God-awful twenty-four hour news networks have different weekend programming. She had no idea what movie she was watching either, just that it was 'some western.'"

"Not sure I could tell you exactly what I was doing on a Saturday a couple weeks ago, though," Mick pointed out. "And I'm not seventy."

"Yeah, but you'd think she could have given me a guess or a character name or _something_. Getting older doesn't mean getting senile."

Mick's mouth opened and then he shook his head slightly and shut it again.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Yeah, right. What is it?"

Another shake. "Best not. Don't think I know you well enough just yet to be making that kind of smartass comment."

Prophet crossed his arms over his chest. "Okay, see, now I'm going to keep wondering until you tell me so you might as well spit it out." Whatever Mick had been going to say couldn't be case-related because he wouldn't keep quiet if he'd had an idea, however odd, but Prophet wasn't sure what the other options were.

Mick seemed to consider for a moment and then gave a shrug that Prophet suspected was a lot less casual than it appeared. "Was just going to say that you'd know more about that than me."

Prophet frowned for a moment, trying to figure out how that statement fit into anything, and then he rolled his eyes and tossed a balled-up napkin at Mick's forehead as his lips twitched involuntarily. "Well, at least you know you're a smartass." As far as age jokes went, he'd heard a lot worse, and he was perfectly capable of telling the difference between a wisecrack and genuine nastiness. "Not sure why you're so determined to get yourself pitched into that pond, though, even if it'll probably be next weekend instead of this one." Short of a miracle, anyway.

Mick's shoulders relaxed and he grinned in return, tossing the napkin back at Prophet. "Like I said, you're welcome to try. So has anything new turned up aside from a mildly suspicious old lady and man impersonating someone named Lydia?"

"A man impersonating his nine year old _daughter_ named Lydia; remember what I said yesterday about Mrs. Addison's son trying to get a car in his daughter's name?"

"Oh, right. That's actually impressively low."

"No argument there. Anyway, he missed his first court date for the car thing—out without bail before the hearing since he didn't actually leave the lot with the car—and neither the local police nor the soon to be ex seem to know where he is. But I did get alibis from Cooper for a couple more of the neighbors," he gestured toward the aerial printout that Mick had made, the pages now taped together to show the full neighborhood layout, "and I got corroboration that the girl who'd been student teaching was in some kind of equestrian class all day that Saturday so that's a few more names crossed off the list, at least."

"Hm." Mick pulled the aerials over, fingers tracing the names that had been listed and crossed out next to each house. "So that only leaves the house at the end of the street on the route to the park, half a dozen or so more families on the route to Lauren's, and maybe twice that for Kennedy's to talk to."

"Seven and thirteen," Prophet agreed. "And we've got confirmed alibis for about half." According to Emily's mother she'd never walked further than Kennedy's house before so although there were a couple more friends within biking distance, the routes to those two houses and the park were the ones they'd concentrated on. "Cooper sent over recordings of a couple more neighbor interviews too, but I haven't started on them yet."

"A wonderful lunchtime activity."

Prophet snorted and moved his computer over to the table and brought up the first file. "Okay, this is Mrs. Jenkins. She lives across the street from the Keadys. Her husband was out of town on business that weekend—one of our confirmed alibis—but she and her two boys, ages four and eighteen months, were home."

* * *

"Is it just me, or does no one seem to like Mrs. Addison except Mrs. Keady?"

"They sure think she's a busybody, anyway," Prophet agreed. "Then again, that I almost _would_ chalk up to being seventy and not having much contact with her own family. I mean, all Mrs. Addison—the other Mrs. Addison—knew about her was that she lived somewhere up in Michigan, which tells me that they hadn't been to visit too often."

"And if she only has the one son, she's only got the one grandchild, too." He rocked a hand. "Well, probably."

"Let's assume just the one for now. The one she was writing a letter to." Prophet tapped a pencil against the tabletop lightly. "The one whose mother just announced to me wasn't going to be having much contact with her father if she had her way."

"And not much contact with her father, probably means not much contact with her maternal grandmother," Mick said. "You know, that sounds awfully stressor-like. Course, if they were just doing letters, she might not have had much contact anyway, but…."

"Think it's time we talked to Cooper, see if he can get a little more information on Mrs. Addison." Prophet pulled out his phone. There was something a little wrong with having his boss as his first number on speed dial, but then, it wasn't like he had a lot of friends in the city.

"Cooper," Cooper said, answering after the first ring.

"Hey, it's Prophet and Mick. Can you talk?"

"Give me a minute." There was some rustling, and then, "What have you got?"

"You're on speaker." Not that Cooper was likely to care, but it was a fair warning. "We're thinking Mrs. Addison is looking a little suspicious."

"The babysitter?"

"Yeah. It's shaky, but Mick picked out some oddness in the interview with you, and then some of the things she said to me earlier were a little questionable too."

"Plus there's a chance she's about to lose contact with her granddaughter," Mick added, "and just from listening to the neighbor interviews that you sent, she seems to take an awfully close interest in the neighborhood children and Emily in particular."

"About to lose contact with her granddaughter…how do you figure?" Cooper asked.

"Her son tried to buy a car in his daughter's name a couple weeks ago. His wife is in the process of divorcing him and seems pretty set on severing contact. Don't know how much luck she'll have, but grandparents have a lot fewer rights than parents."

"Hm."

"What?" Mick asked.

Prophet tilted his head. He hadn't heard anything in Cooper's voice besides acknowledgement, but from Mick's expression, there was something else there.

"Might mean something, might not, but Mrs. Keady mentioned something about thinking about putting her house up for sale when Emily disappeared. Apparently it was just an idea she'd had—wanting to start over, maybe downsize a little—but she did say something about talking it over with a few of her closest friends."

"Which might include Mrs. Addison," Prophet said. "Losing her surrogate-granddaughter, losing her actual granddaughter…."

"I'll talk to her again. Don't want to tip her off so I'll have to make it another routine thing, see if I can get her normal schedule down, but we can check on any recent deviations. What about this son of hers, was he in the area when Emily disappeared?"

"Maybe, maybe not, as far as I've been able to tell he's been in the wind since the whole car thing. The police down in Henderson are officially looking for him for missing his hearing, but he didn't even leave the lot with the car so it's not exactly a high priority case."

"Convince them otherwise."


	9. Mick: History

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley for reviewing._

* * *

Mick braced himself and swallowed half of his cup of coffee in one gulp. He'd never touched the coffeemaker in the office before since he didn't much like the stuff even when it was two-thirds cream and sugar never mind black and as strong as he knew how to make it, but he hadn't managed much sleep last night, and none of what he had gotten had been what he'd called restful. He scowled and then downed the other half of the cup before grimacing and refilling it. Prophet would be here soon, and the last thing he wanted was to have to answer questions about why every other word came out with a yawn. Or to have to avoid answering questions as the case may be.

Damn truck. One backfire when he was half-asleep would have been annoying, enough. Fully conscious he rarely even startled anymore and when he did he calmed just as quickly, and he'd been out of the field long enough that it would have to be pretty damn loud to awaken him out of a sound sleep, but in the haze between asleep and awake he was a lot more vulnerable to old memories. And while snapping awake like that would have made him a little jumpy on a good night, normally he'd have been able to fall back asleep without too much trouble. After a few muttered curses and a glass of water, maybe, but it wouldn't have been an issue.

Last night, however, whoever was driving had been determined to find a parking spot in the neighborhood and had circled Mick's block and the next one over for what felt like hours, backfiring every time it turned a corner, while Mick stared up into the darkness. He'd eventually headed into the sitting room and flipped on the television to some late-night movie just to take his mind off the noises, but although he was pretty sure he'd drifted off at some point, he knew that he'd spent most of the night tossing and turning. And when the damn truck had pulled out again at five in the morning, backfiring half a dozen more times on the way, he'd lurched to his feet scrambling for his gun.

It had taken him way more time to recognize where he was than it should have, and rather than trying to go back to sleep afterwards he'd given it up as a lost cause and gone out for a run. Despite a long shower afterwards and a breakfast that he pushed around more than ate at the place behind the gym he'd still ended up at work early, but there wasn't much he could do besides drink his coffee and hope no one noticed his exhaustion.

He didn't have to go down to the FBI building today, which would help. And Coop wasn't around, which would help more. All the coffee in the world wouldn't fool _him_, and whether he liked it or not, if Coop was here, Mick would be expecting—and slightly dreading—the invitation for a sparring match that was Coop's preferred method for dealing with bad nights. Prophet was the unknown…the guy was sharp, but he and Mick didn't actually know each other that well, and as long as Mick managed to keep from yawning every two minutes or falling asleep at his desk, he thought he'd be all right.

He'd finished most of his second cup of coffee and was debating whether he could force himself to drink a third when a rattling at the door signaled Prophet's entrance, and he pulled the aerial map over to the table quickly and managed a smile of greeting.

"Hey," Prophet returned. "You're in early."

Mick shrugged. "Woke up and figured I might as well come in."

Prophet poured himself a cup of coffee as well and sank down at the table across from Mick. "Come up with anything new?"

"Not really." Especially since he'd only started looking at the map two seconds before. "I—" Prophet's choking cut him off, and Mick looked up. "Are you okay?"

"I will be when my taste buds grow back." Prophet shook his head, looking down into his cup. "No offense, but this is _horrible_. And I've had a lot of bad coffee in my lifetime."

"Sorry," Mick muttered. "I don't exactly like coffee much, so…." He shrugged and then abruptly realized that that probably hadn't been the best thing to say if he didn't want to raise questions given that a good amount of the pot was already gone. Damn sleep-deprived brain.

"Well, for future reference, you generally want to start with water rather than paint stripper." He pushed himself to his feet and pulled the pot back out of the coffeemaker, frowning down into it. "I think this is starting to eat at the glass."

"It is not." Mick hoped, anyway.

Prophet snorted. "Think I'm going to make a new pot anyway. Do yourself a favor and dump that cup before your stomach lining declares mutiny."

Mick didn't see anything different in the way that Prophet put his pot of coffee on, but Prophet seemed satisfied as he dropped back down at the table to wait for it to brew. And Mick was probably going to need another cup or two as the day wore on, so he'd take anything that made it less terrible.

"Is there a particular reason you're drinking coffee when you don't like it?" Prophet asked as he leaned back over the map.

"No." It came out sharper than it probably should have since the question had been about as casual as possible, but aside from a long look, Prophet let it go. Which Mick appreciated, although he wasn't about to call attention to it by acknowledging it.

"Want to go through and divide up the names and then start calling the rest of the neighbors in an hour or so?" Prophet suggested, looking down at the map again. "I figure we've got better odds now that it's a weekend, but nobody's going to be happy—or helpful—if we wake them up."

"Sounds good." Just because they had a potential suspect didn't mean that they could just write off the rest of the possibilities, especially since it was still pretty flimsy. "Coop was going to try and catch Mrs. Addison today, right?"

"Think so. That or after church tomorrow. Said something about it putting her in a confessing mood."

"Huh. Whatever works, I guess." Mick had never had much to do with any kind of organized religion although he was aware that Coop had. Still did, as far as he knew. "Better idea than going name-by-name: you take one side of the street and I'll take the other?"

"Sure, that works. And whoever finishes first gets to start on the teachers and staff we haven't talked to yet. Although if we have to call that principal again, you're doing it, not me."

"Oh, hell, no. I called her originally the first time, remember?" He rolled his eyes and deliberately pitched his voice high. "'Mike? Did you say your name was Mike? I just can't understand you!'"

* * *

Mick looked up as Prophet re-entered the main office, lowering his phone from his ear as he did so. "Well, I've got the Henrys alibiing the MacPhersons, which confirms the MacPhersons alibiing the Henrys. Or something like that." At least in this case the odds of a family of five conspiring to kidnap a little girl and bringing another family of six—or vice-versa—into it were low enough that both he and Prophet were willing to believe them.

"Which means there are only five neighbors along her likely disappearing paths that we haven't managed to get ahold of," Prophet said, leaning over the map to mark off the two families that Mick named. "Not all of the rest are alibied, but we've covered a decent number. Here's to spring cleaning and garage sales, I guess."

"As long as it wasn't some random sale-goer that grabbed her."

Prophet shook his head, but Mick knew damn well that he'd been thinking the same thing that Mick had when a six-family garage sale had first been mentioned. Well, after Prophet had explained what a garage sale was, anyway, since it wasn't exactly something that was common back home. And they both knew that the best they could hope for was that that _wasn't_ the case, because it wasn't like anyone who'd come to the sales had left their name or paid for anything by credit card. It was his turn to shake his head. They were doing the best they could, under the circumstances, even if it didn't necessarily feel like enough. "So did you have any luck with that police department down in Kentucky?" he asked. Prophet had dumped the majority of the remaining teachers on him in exchange for that phone call, and Mick still wasn't sure which of them had got the better deal.

"Depends on how you define 'luck.' I got through no problem, but the lieutenant I spoke to wasn't exactly thrilled that the FBI were making suggestions about which criminals he should be going after. Especially when the one we're looking for is as-yet considered a nonviolent offender."

"You told them he's a kidnapping suspect, right?"

"Yeah, of course. But it's for a kidnapping that occurred up in Michigan which is a little beyond their jurisdiction, as he was more than happy to point out. Not to mention that fact that we can't even prove that he was there at any point; the only person making suspicious statements is his mother. I managed to convince the lieutenant to at least put a detective on the case—the guy did skip his court date, after all—but as to how long he'll _stay_ on the case, your guess is as good as mine."

"Five minutes or less?"

"That's kind of what I'm afraid of. And I've got a feeling those five minutes started while we were still on the phone."

Mick could see where the police were coming from, but it didn't exactly help him and Prophet much. "There's an FBI field office down there somewhere, right? Can we ask them to look around for him?"

"There's one about a hundred and fifty miles away, yeah. And we could, or Coop could, rather, since neither of us are officially agents yet, but I'm not sure the response will be any better. We just don't have much to go on."

Mick tilted his head. "What about Garcia? I mean, she's already managed to get into one set of credit card records." He shrugged. "She might not be able to do much if he's stealing other people's credit cards, but it's worth a try. If we could tell them where to go…."

"We'd probably get a lot more cooperation," Prophet finished with a nod. "Good call, I'll see if I can catch her before she leaves for lunch. And I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry. Want to take a break and head out somewhere?"

Normally Mick would have said yes—getting away from these walls for a hour was a good way to give his mind a break and help him focus again afterward—but he was starting to feel yawns bubbling up again, and after a minute he shook his head. "Nah, let's just order in pizza. We've still got some teachers we haven't reached, and I'd like to get that done before Coop calls this afternoon."

Prophet made a face. "Tell you what, you finish calling the teachers, and I'll get ahold of Garcia and then go pick up a couple of calzones from that deli over on sixteenth. They don't do delivery, but I'm really not in the mood for fast food pizza."

"That sounds good." Especially since if Prophet was out of the office for a bit, Mick could take the opportunity to choke down another cup of coffee or two without being obvious about it. He was willing to admit that Prophet's coffee was better than his, but it still wasn't something he'd start drinking on a regular basis, and he wasn't sure he could keep that from showing in his expression.

The first of the last set of teachers wasn't much help, not that he'd really expected her to be, but Prophet got off the phone with Garcia at about the same time looking considerably happier than he had a few minutes before, and Mick raised a hand in farewell as Prophet headed out of the gym. Technically the next number was for a member of the office staff rather than a teacher, but….

That call yielded nothing new, and with the one after that he found that the woman he was trying to reach was on vacation with her sister in the Caribbean for a week. With a sigh he pushed himself to his feet and refilled his coffee cub again, breaking down enough to add a little milk and sugar this time, and a yawn escaped as he dropped back down at the table. One more call, and the teachers would be out of the way. And maybe putting some food in his stomach would help with his exhaustion. Three or four years ago he'd have been able to stay awake for two days straight with no trouble, but not only had he been in practice then, there was a world of difference between deliberately staying awake and being half asleep and letting one's body think more rest should be forthcoming.

* * *

A hand on Mick's shoulder brought him up with a start, and he lashed out almost instinctively.

"Mick!" someone barked.

"Wh—Prophet?" Mick winced as he realized where he was. So much for finishing his calls. And not falling asleep at the table. "Sorry," he muttered. "You okay?"

Prophet snorted. "Hate to break it to you, but your coordination seems to go a little bit downhill when you're asleep. Which is good for you because if you'd made me drop these calzones I'd have had to kill you. It took me thirty minutes to get through that line."

"I wasn't asleep." The statement was absurd, and he knew it, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he sounded more than a little petulant too, but apparently he wasn't conscious enough to come up with a sensible response just yet.

Another snort. "Sure, kid."

"And I'm not a kid."


	10. Prophet: History

_Thanks to everyone who read and bindsy and narwhaley for reviewing._

* * *

"Morning," Prophet greeted, sticking his key in to lock his car doors as Mick came alongside him.

"Hey," Mick returned. "You know, these days people can do that with a button."

Prophet shrugged and dropped his keys into his pocket. "It works well enough." Besides, aside from the cost of a new car, it was much easier to keep a vehicle running when it was more mechanical than computer. In the last couple years, the scales had been tipping the other way.

Mick shook his head but didn't say anything else, and the two of the matched paces into the gym in silence.

Mick was looking a little more human this morning, Prophet noted, taking a sideways glance as he started his computer. Prophet had enough demons in his past that he wouldn't go prying into anyone else's without some indication that it was welcome—and judging by the way that Mick had reacted when Prophet had woken him up from his insistently not-a-nap it most definitely wouldn't be—but that didn't mean that he didn't sympathize when it came to rough nights.

"I…." Mick grimaced and squared his shoulders as he turned to face Prophet. "Sorry if I bit your head off yesterday. Wasn't exactly in a great mood. Damn truck."

The last was muttered under his breath and was pretty useless as far as explanations went, but it was still more of an acknowledgement than Prophet had expected, and he waved off the apology. "No worries, man. Just find something you _like_ to drink to keep yourself up next time, all right? Must have wasted a pot and a half of perfectly good coffee." Which reminded him that while _Mick_ didn't seem to care for the stuff, he did, and he pushed himself to his feet and went to put some on.

"There's no such thing, mate," Mick called after him.

By the time Prophet returned with a cup, Mick had started up his computer as well, and Prophet gestured towards it absently. "Anything?"

"Nothing from Coop, but church probably isn't out yet. I did get something about ethics, though."

"Ethics?" Prophet frowned and dropped back into his seat to see what had ended up in his inbox. "Oh, the course is back up."

"Can I get few more details? There's not much here except the link."

"You know, one of the web courses we have to take for the academy?" Prophet frowned, thinking back. "I guess maybe you haven't heard about them, they've been down for updates since before you got here."

"No, now that you mention it, I think I do remember you saying something about that once." Mick ran a hand through his hair. "Great, one more thing that I have to do on top of rescheduling that damn law exam and whatever other courses I'm supposed to be starting next week. And, you know, our missing child."

"Have you even gotten your official exam score yet? Maybe you got lucky and squeaked by."

Mick snorted. "Trust me, no one is that lucky. I mean, just to make sure, my name is spelled R-A-W-S-O-N, right? I haven't seen it yet, but there's got to be a line somewhere in the FBI handbook where if you can't spell your own name right, they aren't keeping you around."

Prophet shook his head. "Don't worry so much about it. You've got time, and I'm sure Cooper can get you more if this case drags out. And if they kept _me_, I'm pretty damn sure they'll keep you." He paused, thinking for a moment. "Tell you what, if we aren't here too long today, do you want to come over to my place for dinner? I know I've got chicken that needs to get eaten, and maybe between the two of us we can get at least a chunk of the ethics stuff out of the way." He wouldn't mind the company, and Mick was kind of getting screwed over having to deal with not only the web stuff but also normal coursework and an active case as well. At least Prophet had only had cold cases to work on while he'd been going through the academy; the couple times that he'd needed to take an extra day or two to study, he'd been free to do so.

"Are we allowed to cheat off each other on an ethics course?"

"I don't think it's cheating as long as we take our own tests." He grinned. "And hey, at least I didn't suggest that we finish off the beer in my fridge at the same time."

Mick rocked back in his chair and his lips twitched. "See, now, _that_ might actually make it bearable."

* * *

"—looking closer and there's definitely something off about her, but it's nothing that I can put my finger on. And her worry for Emily seems genuine, but…."

Cooper trailed off, and Prophet nodded despite the fact that Cooper couldn't see him. There was just no guarantee that you'd see crazy coming, even when you were trained to look for it.

"I'm sure you're both glad to be at the end of your neighbor-and-teacher list," Cooper continued, "but I'm afraid you're going to have to start on a new list. All the people that Mrs. Addison knew. Check her routines, and see if anyone has noticed anything unusual about her behavior recently. I sent both a recording of our last interview and a scan of my notes so you should have everything."

"I saw it come in a few minutes ago," Mick said.

"Anywhere in particular you like us to start?" Prophet asked.

"Well, I'm heading back to the church after this to talk to the priest—she did some volunteer work through there—so why don't you two start on her other major social activities. Bridge and bingo, as I recall."

"Living on the edge," Mick murmured.

"We'll get started," Prophet said, returning Mick's grin. While he wasn't exactly looking forward to more phone calls—this would be way easier if he and Mick could just go to Michigan and _drive_ to the various locations—he was well aware that that was the job sometimes.

"And let me know what you get from Garcia," Cooper said after a moment. "You're right, if we can get the current location of Mr. Addison narrowed down a little, I can request that the FBI offices down there get involved in the search. I've been working with Mrs. Keady and the locals to put together a profile for the kidnapper assuming that Mrs. Addison _isn't_ involved, but the more information that we put in, the less and less likely it looks. Even if he's not directly a part of this, I think a chat would be a very good idea."

"You don't think Mrs. Addison will get suspicious about all these questions we're going to be asking?" Mick asked. "I mean, at least some of these people are going to be her friends, and friends talk."

"Hopefully not. Keep it discrete as best you can, but I did tell her that calling them was standard procedure. That we needed to know all of her routines in case someone had been watching her as part of a plan to kidnap Emily, and that we'd already run through the same exercise with Mrs. Keady. Which I did do as part of the standard profile so we're safe enough if she asks. It meant that I had to concentrate on places that she and Emily had gone together to keep from tipping her off, but if she's the one who took Emily, I don't want to risk driving her to any kind of drastic action."

Because a woman kidnapping a surrogate granddaughter was a lot less likely to intentionally harm the child than most of the other options when it came to kidnappers, Prophet knew. Unfortunately he also knew as well as anyone that people backed into corners sometimes did desperate things. "We'll get started," he said, "but I'm guessing we'll have more luck with the business-type stuff tomorrow."

"Probably. Do what you can, and let me know what turns up. I'll do the same."

"So, bridge or bingo?" Mick asked as the line cut off.

"Well, figure bridge is going to be a whole lot faster since we won't be talking about a room full of people. And regular bridge partners should know her pretty well. You've got names there?"

"Yeah." Mick turned his computer so they could both see Cooper's message. "Actually, forget bridge or bingo, it looks like Coop wrote out as many names as he could get, so do you want to split the list? You start at the top, I'll start at the bottom, and whoever finishes their half first can start making another list from Coop's interview recording."

"Works for me. Although if we both listen to the recording and compare notes afterwards, we'll be a lot less likely to miss something." Mick nodded in agreement, and Prophet glanced down at the first name, before opening up his computer again as well. "All right, Ms. Tanya Appleby. Let's just hope there aren't too many Applebys in the phone book."

"Hey, I'm starting with a Williams so I don't think I'd complain if I were you, mate."

It took Prophet three long hours to get through his half of the list—and, like every other collection of phone calls he'd been making recently, there were several that he was going to have to revisit—but it looked like Mick was still working on his half when he finished, so he grabbed a new pad of paper and a set of headphones to start on Cooper's recording. Hopefully there would be something from one of the names Cooper hadn't already listed…so far, aside from some commentary about how worried Mrs. Addison had been about the missing girl, none of her friends had had much to offer.

Cooper was a _good_ interviewer. Prophet had noticed it before, but it was even more obvious now that they had a potential suspect. He'd been on the receiving end of a few interrogations in his life so he had that perspective covered, and he'd done reasonably well in the classes he'd taken, but this was so far out of his league that it wasn't even funny. Without seeming to try, Cooper managed to coax more details out of Mrs. Addison than Prophet had been able to get with direct questions. Clearer answers, too, bits of extraneous information that he doubted that she'd intended to offer…. If Prophet was half as good by the time he left this place he'd be happy.

* * *

"Please try back again later," Mick said with a sigh as he flipped his phone shut. "For the hundredth time."

"Yeah, I had quite a few like that too. Was about to send off an email to Cooper to give him a rundown, do you want to add your stuff before I send it?"

"Yeah, thanks."

Prophet pushed the computer over and then went to rinse out his cup. It was a little early to be heading out, but there wasn't a whole lot else either of them could do at the moment.

"You sure you don't mind me coming over for dinner?" Mick asked as Prophet returned. "I don't want to put you out having to drop me back off at my place afterwards."

Prophet shook his head and grabbed his jacket, flipping his computer shut. "It's no trouble. And there really is no sense in us working on the ethics stuff separately if we can get it done faster together. Come on, grab your stuff."

Another reason Prophet was glad that they were based out of the gym and not the FBI offices was that he didn't have to cross the whole city to get to his apartment, and it wasn't long before he was pulling into an empty spot in the alley. His place wasn't much to look at, just a one-bedroom walkup in a low-rise that had seen better days, but he had a corner unit on the third floor with a decent-sized window in every room—a decent-sized window without any bars on it—and it was never any trouble finding parking in the area. He was happy enough with it.

He flipped on the radio automatically as they entered and then waved Mick into the open kitchen-slash-living area. "Toss your jacket wherever and ignore the mess. I don't have company too often."

"Looks better than my place," Mick said with a shake of his head, laying his jacket over the arm of the couch and setting his laptop bag below it. "Of course, that might just be the lack of cardboard-lined walls."

"Still unpacking?" Prophet asked as he opened the fridge. The chicken…there it was. There were three breasts in the package, rather than the two he'd thought, but none of them were very big.

"No, that's done, or at least as done as it's going to get, but I just sort of stacked the boxes along the wall afterwards." He shrugged. "Not really sure what else to do with them. I don't want to toss them since I'm going to have to move out of the FBI flat eventually, but they didn't plan the whole storage thing very well."

"Welcome to the city."

Mick grinned. "I hear that. Though I guess it's not much different than back home so I probably shouldn't have been surprised. Can I help with something?"

"Well, if you don't mind chopping veggies, I can put on rice and do chicken stir-fry." That would use up all three of the breasts, and Rosa had dropped off some peppers and onions from her little container garden on the roof in thanks for fixing up her car that needed to get eaten soon as well.

"Sounds good," Mick said, flipping on the faucet to wash his hands, and Prophet directed him to the knives and cutting board while he put the rice on and pulled out the chicken.

Slicing up the chicken didn't take long, and he tossed it in the pan with some oil about the same time that Mick finished with the vegetables.

"Where's the toilet?" Mick asked.

"Back through there," Prophet said with a jerk of his head towards the hall. "The door on the left."

"Thanks."

He waited until the chicken was cooked most of the way through to toss the vegetables in, and he was starting to add a little more oil—he really needed to pick up some new pans—when Mick spoke again.

"You've got brothers?"

More of the oil went in than Prophet intended, and he took a moment to collect himself before he answered. "No. Not for a long time." He knew what Mick must be looking at even without turning his head, and he leveled a mental curse at himself for forgetting to stick that damn thing in deep, dark drawer somewhere. At some point a previous owner of this place had built in bookshelves all along two of the living room walls, and despite the occasional visit to the thrift stores down the street, Prophet didn't have anywhere near enough books or music or DVDs to fill them. In an attempt to keep the shelves from looking hopelessly bare he'd ended up tossing up almost all of the keepsakes that he had just to fill in space. It didn't do much good considering that even if he'd had the inclination to collect trinkets, he'd lived too much of his life out of a backpack to give in to it, but among the few things that had gone up was an old framed photograph that should have remained with a couple other items that would never see the light of day. It was the only photo that he had from back when he was a kid, and it was one thing when it was just him rattling around this place, but on the rare occasion that he'd had company over…well, James had asked about it too, and Prophet had meant to put it away as soon as he'd left. "You got any brothers or sisters?" he asked as Mick returned to the kitchen, trying to keep it casual.

"A sister. Jenna. She's just getting started at university."

There was suddenly something in Mick's tone that didn't encourage further questioning, but since Prophet was perfectly fine with letting the entire subject of family drop, he didn't have any problem with that. He glanced over again. "I think this is about done, and the rice should be in a minute or two too. You mind pouring drinks?"

"Sure. Or, what's the phrase? I don't care to?"

Prophet rolled his eyes at Mick's smirk. "Smartass. Glasses are up there." He nodded towards the cabinet to the left of the sink. "I've got milk and OJ in the fridge, or the tap water isn't bad, if you prefer that." He paused. "Or there's the remains of the six-pack I picked up last weekend, but…."

"Yeah, that whole potential ethics violation thing." Mick grinned. "Shame, though."


	11. Mick: Closing In

_Thanks to everyone who read._

* * *

"That doesn't even make sense."

"Sure it does. Prophet frowned. "We were just talking about this."

"I know we were, but that was…yeah, here. An individual person." Mick stabbed his finger at the offending line in his textbook.

"But it extends to the collective."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it does."

"Wh—you just told me it _didn't_ two seconds ago!" His mind wasn't that far gone. At least not yet, although much more of this and that might change.

Prophet shook his head. "That was a different case."

Mick groaned, dropping his forehead onto the table. Or at least onto his textbook, not that that served as much of a cushion. "But w_hy_ are they different?" It came out a lot more plaintive than he intended, and Mick lifted his head and scowled at Prophet as he broke into laughter. "It's not funny."

"Oh, trust me, it is."

Mick crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. "Want to go down to the range tomorrow?"

"All right, all right." Prophet held up his hands in surrender. "Let's take a break."

Mick didn't want to take a break; he wanted this law rubbish to make sense. Unfortunately, saying so wouldn't do much besides make him sound like a six year old. He was damn well going to drag Prophet down to the rifle range tomorrow—or at least convince Prophet to take them down since he still didn't have a car—though, and he was going to thoroughly enjoy kicking the man's arse at any and every target shooting competition he could get him to participate in.

Mick sighed leaned forward again, running a hand through his hair. It wasn't just the frustrating attempt at studying that had him on edge, and he knew it. Oh, the seemingly random contradictions certainly weren't _helping_, but Coop had convinced the locals to check Mrs. Addison's house while she was at her quilting club this evening, and by Mick's estimate they would have left the station fifteen or twenty minutes ago. And even if he knew perfectly well that Coop had been taking care of himself long before Mick had ever met him and had managed just fine between the time they'd shipped home and Mick had arrived here too, the fact was that he was here now, and it was more than a little annoying that he had to just sit around while his friend walked into a potentially dangerous situation. Okay, yes, a seventy year old woman's house in middle-of-nowhere Michigan probably wasn't mined or booby-trapped or had snipers on the neighboring roofs or anything else, but that wasn't the point. He was supposed to _be there_.

He started as a hand slapped his shoulder and then relaxed slightly as Prophet set a mug of something down in front of him. "Thanks," he muttered.

"Don't thank me yet, it's still coffee."

He shrugged. Not that his opinion of coffee had changed much in the last day, but it was something to drink. And judging by the color it was half milk and sugar anyway. He could deal with that.

"Any point in telling you they'll be fine?"

Mick glared at him.

"Yeah, that's about what I figured." Prophet pulled one of Mick's other textbooks over, seemingly at random, and began to scan through it, not saying anything else, and Mick was just as glad. The last thing he needed was someone trying to convince him of something that he knew perfectly well.

He fiddled with his coffee cup for a few seconds and then went back to flipping through the book in front of him. Not that he was really processing much of what he was seeing, but it was better than staring at the wall waiting for the phone to ring.

When the phone finally did ring, it was his rather than the office landline, and Mick answered quickly without checking the caller. "Coop?"

"Hey."

He bit back a sigh of relief. Seventy year old woman, not a high risk, no sense acting like an idiot. "Hold on, let me put you on speaker." It only took a second, and he held his phone out so Prophet was included as well. "How'd it go?"

Coop did sigh, although his had a definite edge of frustration. "Nothing. Not even a child's toy or two anywhere in the house."

"Damn it," Prophet muttered.

"Well, we knew it was a long shot."

"Toys could have been left over from a previous visit anyway," Mick said after a moment. "So it's not like it would have proved anything."

"Yeah. And given how…thin…our excuse for going in was, odds are that a judge would have thrown anything we'd found—short of Emily herself, anyway—out if it ever had to go to trial."

"Hell, I still can't believe you managed to get a warrant at all," Prophet said with a snort. "But did you manage to keep the visit from her?"

"We didn't go in until she'd been clear for twenty minutes, and we pulled out when the car on her sent word back that she was leaving her meeting. There's a slight possibility that one of the neighbors might have noticed that something was going on since her dogs started barking the second we stepped out of the cars and didn't stop until we got back in, but there weren't any calls to the 911 switchboard or anything like that so hopefully it won't come up."

"Well, all the neighbors except Mrs. Keady think she's a busybody and probably don't go out of their way to talk to her," Mick said.

"That's what we're hoping." Coop sighed again. "Look, I know you finished your calls and said you hadn't come up with anything even remotely suspicious, but I want you to walk through her timeline again. Try and pinpoint any large blocks of time unaccounted for, anything like that."

"She's retired," Prophet pointed out. "There's going to be a _lot_ of time unaccounted for."

"I know, but if she's stealing hours to visit Emily somewhere, it's another way you might be able to spot it. Any word on her son?"

Prophet shook his head. "Garcia thought she had something, but it turned out to be just a small time forger based out of Louisville. We passed the info on—figured the locals could handle it or call in the white collar division themselves if they want to—but it doesn't help us much."

"If nothing else, it's some goodwill for the bureau down there. Might come in handy eventually. Keep on it; let me know what comes up. I'll do the same from this end; I think our next step is going to be trying to keep a tail on her full time for the next day or two, but the department isn't large enough that they can spare officers for weeks of effort."

"Thanks, Coop," Mick said, and Prophet echoed his words before the line cut off. "Guess there's not much else we can do tonight," Mick said after a moment. At least not besides studying, and he had no desire to do any more reading at the moment.

"Yeah." Prophet shook his head and pushed himself to his feet. "Come on, I'll give you a ride home."

* * *

"Damn it!"

Mick winced as Prophet slammed the piece of chalk down into the tray. _That_ wasn't going to be useable again. "Come on, mate, let's have a break." It had been a frustrating morning going back through notes and calls and everything else and trying to map out a schedule on the chalkboard, and he was more than ready to grab a quick lunch and maybe fire off a few rounds down at the range to help clear his mind.

Prophet didn't move, and after a moment, Mick caught his arm and tugged lightly. And then rocked back abruptly as Prophet yanked his arm out of his grasp and spun on him. There was no sign of the relatively easy-going guy he'd become used to working with; this was someone who was very angry and unless Mick missed his guess, very, very dangerous.

"Calm down!" Mick snapped as Prophet's eyes flashed. It might not be the most intelligent thing to do—under the circumstances and given what little he knew of Prophet's past, that probably would be 'back off fast'—but…well, he'd never been the 'back off' sort of guy.

Prophet glared at him for a few more long seconds, hands clenched, and then he closed his eyes and some of the tension seemed to run out of him. Not all of it, but he did take a slight step backwards and relaxed his hands before he opened them again, and when he did, it came with a muttered, "Sorry. That wasn't directed at you."

"Kind of figured," Mick said, feeling his shoulders relax again as well as the Prophet that he was familiar with returned. "I mean, I understand that it's irritating to try and explain the same law to me three times in a row, but if you were going to bloody my nose for that, it would have made more sense to do it last night."

The attempt at a joke got a snort out of Prophet, along with the slightest twitch of his lips. "Never saw much point in punching people in the nose when there are more damaging places to hit. But having said that, taking a break is probably a very good idea. Want to grab something at the…?" He jerked his thumb towards the back door and presumably the restaurant-and-bar on the other side of the street.

"Works for me." It took all of two minutes to get there, and Mick glanced over as the waitress waved at them to take a table. "Can I ask what did set you off? You seemed fine when we got in this morning." No happier than Mick had been to start going through their stacks of paper again, maybe, but that wasn't exactly a red flag.

He shook his head. "Just frustrated. Was really hoping they'd find her last night. I mean, on one hand I knew it was a long shot, but at least it was a _chance_." He shook his head again.

"It's not over yet," Mick said. "I mean, I'm not in the habit of kidnapping preteens, but if I was, I don't think I'd be keeping them in my basement."

"Garcia says there's no other property in her name. And if we're wrong and it wasn't Mrs. Addison that grabbed her, she's probably already…."

Dead and buried—or at least disposed of—Prophet didn't say, but then, he didn't need to. "We knew that going in," Mick pointed out.

"Yeah. But she's just a kid, and I..."

"You want to go down to the range for a bit after we eat?" Mick asked, deciding that a change of subject was in order when Prophet looked away, showing no sign of continuing with whatever he'd been about to say. "Maybe thinking about something else for a bit will help."

"Yeah, because putting a gun in my hands right about now sounds like a great idea."

"You're wearing a sidearm, mate."

"Oh. Right." He shook his head, flushing slightly. "Guess I'm still getting used to that."

Putting his on in the morning had become so much a habit for Mick during his time in the military that not wearing had never stopped feeling wrong, and as much as he didn't plan on admitting it, it was nice to be back in a position where doing so was normal. He could see how that could be different for someone who wasn't used to wearing one, though, even if it did leave him suddenly curious about how the man that Prophet had killed had died. Although bringing that up wasn't likely to raise the tone of the conversation any—nor did Prophet have any requirement to answer him anyway—so he stuck with the original topic. "So what about it?"

"Suppose I ought to do _something_ to make you feel better about not being able to keep basic search and seizure procedure straight," Prophet said, and if his smile looked a little forced, at least it was a smile. "Although if it's competition you're looking for, you'd be better off getting one of the range instructors involved."

Mick grinned. "I'm perfectly fine with showing you up."


	12. Prophet: Closing In

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley for reviewing._

* * *

Prophet threw himself down on his couch with a sigh. Today had not been a good day. To put it mildly. Of course, it could have been worse, but that wasn't saying much considering how close he'd come to cracking Mick's jaw. Fortunately Mick had accepted his apology easily enough—and more fortunately he hadn't actually broken any bones—but he didn't need his temper getting away from him like that again. He couldn't _afford_ to let his temper get away from him like that again.

He ran a hand over his face. He'd known that cases involving kids would be an issue for him, he and Cooper had talked about it more than once, and it had come up quick in the decidedly-less-than-comfortable interview he'd had with the director too, but up until a little while ago he'd been holding it together pretty well. Right up until they'd not found Emily at Mrs. Addison's house.

He grabbed the remote off the coffee table and thumbed the television on. Hopefully there would be a game or something on to help him get his mind off things. Not that he expected it to help much; the hum of the radio in the background certainly wasn't doing any good.

At first, when they'd gotten the case, he'd told himself that she was dead and there was nothing that he could do except try to catch her killer. He hadn't liked it—who would?—but he knew the odds as well as anyone, and that done is done and that some things couldn't be fixed were concepts that he'd learned a long time ago. But then there had been _hope_, damn it all, and losing it again had hurt.

He shook his head. Mick was right. If Mrs. Addison had kidnapped Emily, and Prophet still thought that she was the best suspect, it made sense that she'd be keeping her somewhere besides her house. They just had to figure out where that somewhere was.

He groaned and flipped the television off again without even a glance at whatever had come up on the screen. If they were going to get many cases like this, he was going to have to pick up a punching bag somewhere. He should have done it already. Would have, if he'd thought about it. For now, though….

He shoved the coffee table out of the way and rolled to the floor, dropping into the pushup position. It wasn't the first time in his life that he'd needed to burn energy and had no equipment available. Besides, while Mick had clobbered him on the rifle range this afternoon—completely expected, although Prophet appreciated the fact that when Trevors and a couple other guys there had made comments about it, Mick had promptly kicked their asses too, even if he didn't doubt that Mick had just been looking for an actual challenge when he'd done it—that didn't mean that he was going to let the guy get a leg up on him when it came to hand-to-hand. He'd probably never beat Mick for speed, the fact was that he was almost forty years old and his reflexes were never going be those of a twenty-some year old kid again, but he had more muscle than most people realized and didn't plan on losing it anytime soon. And maybe if he did enough pushups, he could wear himself out enough to sleep tonight.

* * *

Prophet took a deep breath. The chalkboard hadn't magically filled itself in any more, but that wasn't exactly a shock, and he was as ready to give it another go as he was going to get. He and Mick had been filling items in individually yesterday, but maybe comparing notes would let them check off a few more squares.

"Okay, we've only got three pieces of chalk left, so try not to go smashing them to dust before we get this all sorted out, yeah?" Mick said.

"You're funny. Really."

"I've always thought so."

A reluctant grin escaped at Mick's smirk—if he was at all worried about Prophet's temper, he was showing no sign of it—and Prophet shook his head. "So what have we got?"

"Well, we've got the quilting society Monday from ten-thirty to noon. Looks like both of us put names in that one."

Prophet nodded. It might have been a good idea to use different colors of chalk or something, but as it was, they had distinctive enough handwriting that it wasn't hard to tell who had written what.

"And then needlepoint on Wednesday from one to two." Mick shook his head. "I didn't know people actually did needlepoint."

"I'm not totally sure what needlepoint _is_. But then again, I can't sew much beyond patches, and that's only if you aren't too picky about it looking pretty, so I don't think I'm the person to talk to there."

Mick shrugged. "I guess it's an option when you're seventy and looking for something to do in your free time. The Ladies' Tea is Friday at noon…are those the only morning and early afternoon activities we have for her?"

"Well, she used to read to kindergarteners, but that's only during the school year. Eleven to noon on Tuesdays."

Mick scribbled it in but put a light line through it afterwards, and Prophet didn't object. If only because it made the chalkboard look the smallest bit less empty.

"And at night we have bingo six to eight on Tuesdays and then bridge at the same time on Fridays. Usually following dinner. Or…wait." Mick took a step back, frowning at the chalkboard. "Why did you put Bingo on Thursdays?"

"Because Bingo is on Thursdays."

Mick set the chalk down and started digging around in his notes. "No, I'm almost sure Mrs. Williamson said…yeah, here it is. Bingo is Tuesdays in the basement of the church…." He trailed off with a frown. "Well, the church something, I'm not totally sure what I wrote there, but it's the building next to the church. She hasn't played in a while because of her hip—in fact Mrs. Addison has been visiting her on Mondays after the quilting thing, I guess I should have written that in—but she was pretty clear about the day."

"I think that says 'annex,'" Prophet said, leaning over to look at Mick's notepad. "Possibly with a couple too many ns. Seriously, man, where did you learn to spell?"

"Shut up. Anyway, Tuesday."

"Except that they moved out of the church annex because of flooding a month or so ago." Prophet scanned through his own notes quickly. "Yeah, right here. A sprinkler got set off accidentally somehow, and by the time someone figured out how to shut the thing off it had flooded the entire basement. They ended up moving into the back room of some café, a room that they could only get on Thursday nights, and apparently haven't bothered to move back."

"Hey, if it was me, I'd pick a café over a basement," Mick said with a shrug. "But you're absolutely sure that they're there on Thursdays?"

"According to Mrs. Henderson and Mr. and Mrs. Kyle."

"Great, because we don't have enough blank spaces." Mick retrieved the chalk and put a line through the Tuesday night Bingo notation quickly. "All right, well, then from Coop we've got her working in the office at the church after church on Sundays—that's already on there—and on and off during the week depending on what needs doing. Fundraising or bookkeeping or something like that, but she apparently didn't have a regular schedule for it."

"She used to volunteer with one of the youth groups too," Prophet put in, "but she hasn't done that in a while so I didn't put it in. That was Saturdays, usually after the afternoon service."

"Think she stopped volunteering or got un-volunteered?" Mick asked.

Prophet rocked a hand. "I'm guessing got un-volunteered based on what her neighbors had to say about her, but who knows. She definitely didn't mention it, though; I heard it from one of her bridge partners."

Mick stared at the board for a moment and then gave one last cursory glance through his stack of papers. "And that's all I've got."

Prophet flipped through his as well, but to his absolutely lack of surprise nothing new jumped out at him. "Me too, I'm afraid. So Saturdays and apparently Tuesdays are totally empty, with lots of blank spaces left on the other days too."

"We know she claims to watch the news in the morning," Mick offered.

"Yeah, great. You want to go ahead and put the terriers in as references?" Prophet shook his head and pushed himself up from the table. "Look, I'm going to give Garcia a call, maybe she's got something new on Mr. Addison. And maybe I'll try the Kentucky PD again too. The guy's got to be _somewhere_."

* * *

"Hey, Prophet, do you know what time the janitor comes in?"

"What?" Prophet stuck his phone back in his pocket and dropped back down at the table. "Sometime late afternoon, I think. Why, what'd you do?" He hadn't heard any crashes while he'd been in the office making calls and didn't see anything that looked broken.

Mick shook his head. "Nothing, I was just wondering how long it takes to clean up a flooded basement and figured he'd be the guy to ask. No new leads?"

"Nothing from the police—although I had to run through the whole thing from the beginning just to get them to look him up in the computer so I'm thinking there hasn't been a lot of searching going on—and Garcia pulled Mrs. Addison's phone and credit card records but nothing strange jumped out. She's going to email them over, just in case, but I don't think there's anything there for us to work with."

"Are we supposed to have access to those?"

"No comment." He'd heard a rumor while he was at the academy that one of the FBI techs was so good they'd been given the option of FBI or prison for some stuff they'd done pre-FBI, and he was starting to wonder if that happened to be _their_ tech. "However, on the upside, she does think has a line on a rental car Mr. Addison might have taken. The name it was rented under was totally bogus, but it's a bogus name he's used previously, and she's waiting for them to send her the security feed to see if we can get a positive ID."

"Well, if he's in a rental car, that's good news. I mean, those have trackers, right?"

"Yeah. She'll call me back as soon as she has something. But as far as cleaning up flooding, a lot depends on how much water came in, what equipment—pump, wetvac, fans, whatever—is available, that sort of thing. You generally want to get it done as soon as possible, though, because water messes stuff up pretty quick. Why?"

"Well, if the basement of the church annex flooded over a month ago, shouldn't they have cleaned it up by now?"

"Definitely. At least if they didn't want to get stuck having to rebuild most of it." He frowned, leaning over to look at what Mick was reading. "Wait, they haven't?"

"I don't know. I mean, we know they moved the Bingo games to the café and haven't moved them back, but I was looking through the rest of my notes and there are comments from some of the people she worked with about doubling up offices in the church itself, moving the religious classes they teach to the church as well after services…there's no mention of anyone using the annex after the flood."

"Oh. Well, that doesn't mean they didn't get the flooding cleaned up," Prophet said after a moment. "If they had to rip out drywall or insulation or flooring or whatever, they might still be waiting for money to replace it." When he'd been in construction, his job had always involved actually _doing_ the work not finding the money to get it done, but that didn't mean that he hadn't heard plenty about the joys of waiting for insurance payouts. He paused as Mick's words set in. "Wait, you're saying that building has been sitting unused for the last month?"

"The basement for sure. I don't know about the upper level, I know some people said they moved offices, but I guess there might be others still there." One shoulder twitched. "Either way, we've got at least an unused floor that probably isn't flooded anymore, that we know Mrs. Addison has access to, and that no one has used in a month. I don't know what kind of soundproofing it might have, but…."

"It's a basement, it wouldn't need more than standard building material if no one else is using the building." Having offices still in use on the main floor would make it harder, but…. Prophet drummed his fingers against the desk. "You know, if they were using it for offices and classes and Bingo and whatever, it has to have a bathroom too. Maybe even some kind of break room or mini-kitchen. They said they turned the water to the sprinkler off to shut off the flood, but unless they did it from the main—which is unlikely—the rest of the building should still be fine."

"Plus, since Mrs. Addison volunteers at the church, no one would think twice about seeing her in the area no matter what day it was." Mick pulled out his phone and raised an eyebrow, and Prophet nodded.

"Call him. But tell him to be careful." Prophet gestured at the chalkboard.

"Right. It's Tuesday." Mick tapped the screen and then put his phone to his ear. "Coop? We might have something. Do you think you could convince that priest to let you and some officers take a look in the church annex?" A pause. "Well, it looks like the basement, at least, has gone unused since it flooded—which was before Emily disappeared—and Prophet says they should have cleaned up the flooding even if they haven't replaced stuff yet. And Mrs. Addison has access."


	13. Mick: Results

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley and Sara for reviewing._

* * *

Mick spun on the ball of his foot and started to head back to the other side of the office, only to halt abruptly to keep from running into Prophet. "What?"

If Prophet heard the warning in his tone, he ignored it as he crossed his arms over his chest and made no move to get out of Mick's way. "Would you knock it off? You're starting to make _me_ antsy."

Mick scowled. He knew perfectly well that he was being stupid; he didn't need anyone else pointing it out. It was like with Mrs. Addison's house the other night, the odds of a church annex being booby trapped were next to nothing, and it wasn't like Coop couldn't take care of himself just fine anyway. But, again like the other night, he was stuck here waiting for a phone call instead of out there doing his damn job. And this time they didn't even know where Mrs. Addison was.

"You want to hit the bags?" Prophet asked after a moment.

"Why not?" He needed to do something, and it sounded better than pacing. And probably safer than sparring given how on edge he was at the moment, although Prophet seemed to have calmed down quite a bit since yesterday. Mick very much doubted that that would last if they were wrong about Mrs. Addison hiding Emily in the annex, but…well, no point in worrying about that now. He double-checked that his mobile was in his pocket and headed for the gym.

Prophet followed him out, not even bothering to ask if Mick wanted to take the first set as he shifted behind the bag to brace it in place, and Mick squared himself and laid into it. It felt good to be doing _something_, at least. He wasn't sure how long he was going for, but a sharp pain in his hand brought him out abruptly, and he winced as he realized that he'd split a couple knuckles.

"You all right?"

"Hm? Yeah." Mick shook his head and gestured at the bag. "Have they got wipes somewhere to clean this off?"

Prophet reached up onto one of the shelves along the wall and then tossed something in his direction, and Mick caught the flying object automatically, opening the foil packet and wiping the bag down quickly. "Thanks. You want a go?"

"Sure. You better clean that hand up first, though."

Prophet was tying off his wraps when Mick returned—Mick needed to remember to get a set before the next time he used the bag; he'd had some, but he didn't think they'd been in the stuff he'd shipped to himself—and Mick braced the bag and nodded for him to go ahead. And then braced a little harder because Prophet wasn't holding back, and apparently he was a little more tense than he'd been letting on.

Mick wasn't sure how long Prophet would have kept going, but a ringing from his pocket drew their attention, and Mick stepped back and pulled out his mobile quickly. "Coop?"

"I'm here. Is Prophet with you?"

"Yeah." He took a quick glance around, but aside from a couple guys working out on the weights, there was no one else in the gym. Since they were out of earshot, he thumbed the phone over to speaker. "Anything?"

"We found Emily, and the local PD is staking out both the church and Mrs. Addison's house so hopefully we'll have her soon as well."

Prophet closed his eyes, releasing his breath, but there was something in Coop's tone that Mick didn't like. "Is she all right? Emily, I mean."

"We won't know until she wakes up. Her vitals weren't great when we found her…the doctors have stabilized her, but it looks like Mrs. Addison has been keeping her compliant with some kind of drug cocktail, and they won't be able to assess the damage until the last of them work their way out of her system."

"Where did she get the drugs?" Mick asked, at the same time as Prophet's "What kind of drugs are we talking about?"

"From what we could determine from the bottles we found, it was a combination of leftover drugs that once belonged to Mr. Addison— fortunately years expired so they'd lost a lot of potency—and generic over-the-counter stuff that no one would raise an eyebrow at. Sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, that sort of thing. And the fact that Emily hasn't had much to eat probably didn't help." He sighed. "Like I said, we'll know more when she wakes up. That was nice work, both of you."

"Thanks, Coop," Mick said, Prophet echoing him.

"If you weren't planning on it already, take the rest of today and tomorrow off. I want to have a word with Mrs. Addison before I fly back so even if they locate her soon I don't expect to get in until tomorrow morning at the earliest, but I should see you both on Thursday."

"Sounds good," Mick said, nodding although Coop couldn't see him. "See you when you get back."

"Later," Prophet said.

The line cut off a moment later, and Mick stuck his phone back in his pocket. And then grinned and launched himself at Prophet. It wasn't until he had his arms around Prophet's neck that it occurred to him that Prophet wasn't one of his mates from the service and might not appreciate being half-tackled—or even hugged, for that matter, there were people that didn't—and that if he did react badly, the thin mat under the punching bag wasn't likely to provide much protection from the concrete floor.

Fortunately Prophet just laughed and braced himself, hugging Mick back and then releasing him with a slap on the shoulder. "Come on, man. After that, I could use a cold one. Or three."

"Got that right." Mick glanced over. "Know anywhere good besides the place out the back?" Not that it was a bad bar, but he wouldn't mind a little variety.

"There are a couple places near my apartment that are all right, if you don't mind the fact that you might get stuck catching the bus or crashing at my place for an hour or two until I'm good to drive again."

"I don't mind if you don't." Being within walking distance of one of their places did sound like a good idea now that Prophet mentioned it, and Mick already knew that there wasn't much else in this area.

The immediate area around Prophet's flat was pretty residential, Mick had noticed that the first time he'd visited, but it turned out that there was a short row of shops and restaurants and that sort of thing a couple blocks north. The neighborhood was still a little more sedentary than Mick would prefer, but it was easy enough to drop the car off in Prophet's parking spot in the alley and then walk over and get a table and a couple beers at the sports bar on the corner.

"So how'd you know, anyway?" Mick asked curiously, leaning back in his chair as they waited for their burgers to come.

"How'd I know what?"

"About cleaning up flooded basements. You've done it before?" Mick didn't think it could be something that happened at Prophet's current place, not when he was up on the third floor, but there hadn't been any hesitation in his voice when he'd answered Mick's question earlier.

One shoulder twitched, and Prophet took a long drink. "Couple times. I spent ten years bouncing around all kinds of manual-labor type jobs, and busted pipes and window well leaks and whatever aren't that uncommon. Not your kind of thing, I take it?"

"It's not something that comes up a lot in the military," Mick said with a shake of his head. "Especially in the desert." Prophet raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "I joined up right out of school and was in until just a bit ago. Can't talk much about that, though." Technically even 'the desert' was more specific than he was really supposed to get, but given that Prophet wasn't an idiot, Mick doubted that he was revealing anything new.

"Kind of figured from what Cooper didn't say."

Mick shrugged again. He doubted that Coop would have said anything even if he could have. He was good about that sort of thing. "It doesn't bother you?" he asked after a moment. That had been something he'd had trouble with a few times at university; when people found out you'd served they wanted details, and they sometimes got pushy when you wouldn't give them to them. Even when your reason was that you couldn't. He hadn't run into it so much at the FBI, but then again, aside from classes and a few lunches, he'd spent most of his time with Prophet and Coop.

Prophet shook his head. "Not particularly. I mean, I can't swear I won't _ask_ about something you can't or just don't want to talk about sometime, but it's not going to bother me if you tell me to mind my own business. Especially since I guarantee I'll do the same if you start asking about the things that _I_ don't talk about."

"Fair enough," Mick said. "But I do have a question that probably falls into that category."

"So ask. I just won't promise I'll answer."

"Where did the nickname Prophet come from?"

Prophet grinned. "That's fair game, I guess, although it's not really much of a story. I've always had a pretty good eye for when things were about to get bad, even back when I was a kid. On the outside it comes in handy on occasion, but on the inside…." Prophet trailed off with a shake of his head. "Being able to sort out who's got a shank and planning to use it—or worse, a zip gun, because those damn things spit shrapnel and not always in the direction they're aimed—which guards are having a bad day, when a fight's about to break out, that sort of thing, it keeps you alive. And if you get the hell out of the way enough times half a second before the shit hits the fan, people start to notice. So, Prophet."

"Huh. And now it's that and not Jonathan ever?"

"Well, it was never Jonathan unless someone was pissed off at me or being really weirdly formal, but no, after six years of Prophet, I never quite made the switch back to Jon."

"It doesn't bother you?" Of all the things that Mick could imagine losing, his name wasn't one of them.

Prophet shook his head again and drained the last of his beer. "Jon was a different person in a different lifetime. Prophet suits as well as anything now. My turn?"

Mick took the hint that he was done talking about that and gestured for him to go ahead.

"Why a sniper?"

It was a reasonably non-prying question, but it was Mick's turn to shrug. "There's not a lot to it. You have to be in the service for a minimum of three years before you can apply to…." He trailed off with another shrug—certain agencies were on the list of things that he _definitely_ wasn't supposed to talk about—but Prophet dipped his head marginally anyway. Which Mick had pretty much expected. Again, the guy wasn't stupid. "But when I did get in…well, I've got good eyes, good reflexes, and the right temperament so they tapped me for some extra training." Prophet nodded again, and Mick decided that it was about time to switch to a lighter subject. "So if you had a bunch of different jobs, what was the weirdest one? Or the worst?"

Prophet grinned. "Two different things, believe me." The waitress stopped by the table and gestured at his empty glass, and he nodded. "Please. I'm guessing my friend needs a refill too."


	14. Prophet: Results

_Thanks to everyone who read and narwhayley for reviewing. Almost done (I think)…probably one more chapter after this one._

* * *

Where the hell could he be? Prophet crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. He hated to bother Garcia with this given that Emily had been found safe—and it wasn't like they weren't back in the middle of a stack of cold cases that actually needed to be solved—but it was a loose end, and it was irritating.

He was still staring at the board, debating whether it was worth bringing up with Cooper, when an arm looped around his neck, and he slammed an elbow back even as he threw himself sideways into a roll that would break even the most determined grip. Someone who had a weapon wouldn't have gone for his throat first, or at least he wouldn't have _grabbed_ him by the throat, but that didn't mean he was in any less danger.

"Stop!"

Prophet heard Cooper's barked order, but he didn't fully process it until he was on his feet again, centered and twisting back on the threat. Except that it was a threat that wasn't because the only one anywhere near him was Mick, and he was on the ground with one arm clamped down over his ribs. Shit. Shit, shit, _shit_.

Cooper got to Mick while Prophet was still trying to calm the blood pounding in his ears, which was probably just as well, and the glare that Cooper shot him was more than enough to make Prophet decide to sit tight for a few minutes. Given the right angle he was more than capable of breaking bones, and while he hadn't gotten anything like his full weight behind the strike since his instinctive reaction had been to get away and didn't think that he could have done worse than knock the wind out of Mick….

After a few quiet words from Cooper, Mick moved the arm he was using to protect his ribs away to let Cooper to check them, and Prophet felt himself relax a little as Cooper's expression calmed after a few minutes of probing. And he breathed a sigh of relief as Cooper got to his feet a moment later, pulling Mick up with him. No way Cooper would have let him up if there was the chance he was actually hurt.

"What was that for?" Mick asked, turning towards Prophet, and if his words preempted whatever Cooper had planned to say, there was still more than a hint of accusation in his tone.

There was no point in trying to explain, and Prophet shook his head. "I'm sorry. I am _so_ sorry. I didn't mean to do that to you."

"Well, you did." Mick's scowl wavered slightly. "Why?"

"I didn't…." Prophet shook his head again, running a hand across his face. "I didn't know you were there. I don't mind roughing around, I really don't, but I have to know you're there first. Grabbing me from behind, especially around the throat…it's not going to end well." Lashing out under those circumstances was survival instinct pure and simple, and he wasn't sure that it was something that he could quash at this point. Hell, his heart was still beating faster than it should be, and it wasn't just because he felt like crap for putting Mick down like that.

Understanding flashed across Mick's face a moment later—Mick's and Cooper's both, which was probably good for his long-term employment prospects although that wasn't exactly his major concern at the moment—and Mick flushed slightly. "Oh. I guess that probably wasn't the most intelligent thing I could have done."

"It's not your fault. I should have said something earlier." Because he and Mick had roughhoused before, it just hadn't occurred to Prophet to warn him about attacking without some kind of advance notice. Why would it when he'd been looking right at Mick on every other occasion? "Are you all right?" he asked.

Mick waved a hand. "I'm fine. Really. Just got the breath knocked out of me for a second. Lunch might have taken a bit of a hit, though."

Mick gestured behind him, and Prophet recognized the logo from the deli just down the street from the FBI campus on the bag on the ground. He shook his head. "So the salads will be really tossed."

Mick snorted and leaned over to grab the bag, and Prophet's eyes narrowed as he tried to see if he was favoring any ribs. He didn't seem to be, which was something, but….

"So what were you so focused on that you didn't hear me come in, anyway?" Mick asked as he straightened.

"Hm? Oh." He shrugged and tried to pretend that he hadn't been staring, waving a hand at the board behind him. Most of the other chalkboards had been erased and refilled with other notes, but this one still held some of Mrs. Addison's schedule. "I was just wondering where _Mr_. Addison was. I know Garcia was tracking down the rental car he got, but then we found Emily, and…." He shrugged again. "I guess it probably doesn't matter now, but I was thinking about it earlier, and it was bugging me."

"I can ask Garcia the next time I talk to her," Cooper offered, obviously making an effort to push past what had happened. "She's usually got a pretty heavy caseload, but if the trace came back with anything it wouldn't hurt to send the information down to Kentucky."

Prophet nodded in thanks—for both the offer and the effort—and then turned back to Mick and made his own effort to move on. "So did you get your results for the law exam back?" Mick had been cautiously optimistic when he'd gotten back from retaking it the other day, and Prophet had figured he'd done fine as long as he hadn't second-guessed himself too much, but he'd still had to wait for the official results.

"Oh. Yeah." Mick broke into a grin. "I didn't ace it, but I damn well passed. And I got my name right too."

Cooper snorted at that, and Prophet grinned. "Always a bonus. You're all caught up, then?"

"Well, I did get my hand to hand out of the way this morning—and let me tell you, man, he didn't make half as good an attempt to break ribs as you did—but there's still the driving test before I'm back even with the rest of them. Although I think I'm ahead of most of them on the web stuff. There's only the one we haven't done yet, right?"

Prophet nodded.

"Good on that, then." He smiled slightly as he dug their lunches out of the bag and passed them over. "No offense, Coop, I know you got as much of my stuff waived as you could, but I'm more than ready to be done. Didn't really like being stuck in this office while you were out there."

Cooper nodded. "It'll be good to have both of you in the field."

Prophet shot him a quick smile but didn't comment as he popped the top off his lunch. He was more than ready to be done as well, and hopefully he and Mick could knock off that last course after the game Saturday so he would be, but until he had the badge in his hand, he wasn't going to tempt fate. Part of him was still expecting someone to show up and veto it—and they legitimately could, too, despite the work he'd put in, given FBI regulations—and an incident like earlier didn't exactly make him feel any better about things. He had a feeling that his nerves were going to be raw for the rest of the day at least.

* * *

Prophet grinned down at Mick. "Well, the point is generally to end up touching the base, but I suppose it could have been worse. Last time you didn't go much of anywhere at all."

"Shut up, mate."

He shook his head and offered a hand to pull Mick to his feet. "Come on, how about one more try and then we call it for the day? If you get much dustier, no one is going to let us in to eat lunch."

"One more try as long as it ends with me touching the bloody thing," Mick said, catching the proffered hand.

"Fair enough." It hadn't occurred to Prophet until Mick had nearly wiped out the other team's second baseman—who, at a few years past sixty, was one of the oldest players in their league and not someone who needed to be taking body slams from twenty-some year olds running full speed—but although Mick must have seen people slide, he had no idea how to do it himself. Fortunately Mick had realized what was about to happen and had pulled himself up before they'd slammed into each other, but it had been close, and Prophet had ended up dragging him off to an unused kiddie field at the back of the park after the game for a lesson. Teasing aside, Mick was picking it up as quickly as anyone he'd ever seen.

And, fortunately for Prophet's lingering sense of guilt over putting him down the other day, he really didn't seem to be having any issues with his ribs.

"I'm _fine_," Mick said with a roll of his eyes, apparently catching Prophet's stare. And obviously interpreting it correctly. "You know, I don't really remember either of my grandmothers, but if I did, I'm sure I'd remember them worrying much less than you."

"Smartass."

"Well, yeah." He shrugged. "Seriously, man, I didn't think about it until later, but no way would I have tried that with Coop, at least not without expecting to wake up in hospital. And odds are I'd do the same if someone tried it with me. There's no reason to think you'd react any different."

Prophet wasn't sure what he could say to that—if he was even supposed to say anything—but Mick obviously considered the subject closed as he shrugged again and then backed up and took another run at the bag. This time he managed to make contact, possibly a little harder than intended, but definitely better than his previous attempt, and Prophet nodded. "Think you've got it. It's just a matter of sorting out distances once you've got the technique down, and that's experience as much as anything."

"Food, then," Mick agreed, holding up a hand.

"Right," Prophet agreed, tugging him to his feet again, and after a second of thought he wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "But if we just walk this way first, there's this nice little pond…."

"Oh, hell no." Mick obviously recognized the reference because he squirmed away almost immediately and darted back a couple feet. "Nice try, but I'm not going in any pond." He paused. "Besides, they definitely won't let us in if I'm soaked."

Prophet grinned. "Was worth a shot. And anyway, they'd let _me_ in."

Mick snorted and then bounced back close enough to shove him. "Chinese? I thought I saw a little place next to the pizza shop."

"Sure, why not? You still coming over so we can finish that last web course this afternoon?"

"Hell, yeah. Wasn't joking when I said I wanted everything out of the way. But I tried testing out of the driving course yesterday and it didn't go so well, so you mind if we swing by the FBI course for an hour or two first?"

Prophet shrugged. "Fine by me. You might be better off running it with Cooper Monday, though, if another case doesn't come in. I did manage to test out of the course, but it was closer than I'd have liked. Apparently I drive a little aggressively for their tastes."

"Why?"

He shrugged again. "Just how I drive, I guess." Well, the fact that the person who'd originally taught him hadn't been an entirely upstanding citizen probably hadn't helped, but there wasn't much point in going into that. Mick had already gotten one up-close look at what the darker part of his past had left him with this week.

"Eh, it wouldn't kill me to run it twice," Mick said with a shrug of his own.


	15. Coop: Agents

_Thanks to everyone who's been reading and bindsy and narwhayley for reviewing. Last chapter for this story, and this one is from Sam's POV (and there's a tiny fix-it for The Fight because they spelled Prophet's name two different ways between his intro and his badge and that sort of thing annoys the hell out of me)._

* * *

"Do you want me to mimic your passengers screaming in terror, or are you okay imagining it for yourself?" Prophet asked from the seat behind him before Sam could say anything. "I mean, I'm not much for screaming normally, but I could make an exception."

"What are you talking ab—bloody _hell_." Mick jerked the wheel, putting the car back on the right side of the road. Literally. "I hate you, mate."

There was no heat in his words, and Sam didn't bother to hide his grin at Prophet's snort. Mick had actually been driving very well on the challenge parts of the course, but on the intervals between obstacles he kept switching to the left side of the road as he relaxed. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, probably, given where he'd grown up and learned to drive, but Sam was very glad that he hadn't suggested that Mick rent a car when he'd first arrived.

"Besides, you just about sent me out the window the other day so I don't know why you're complaining about my driving," Mick continued after a minute.

"Here's a hint: you keep sending us into oncoming traffic. Or you would be if we weren't on a closed course, anyway. Besides, I told you three times to tighten your seatbelt. There comes a point where you just have to invoke Darwin."

Mick muttered something rude under his breath that Sam couldn't quite make out, but Prophet only chuckled in response.

Sam was a little surprised at how close Mick and Prophet had gotten in the short time they'd known each other. Not that he'd expected them to have trouble getting along, at least not once they'd had time to size each other up, but for all his outward cheerfulness Mick was not among the most trusting in the world, and everything he'd learned from Prophet had told him that Prophet was the sort who kept to himself. He wasn't unfriendly, just very private. Sam had actually been a little worried about Mick in that respect because while Mick might not give much of himself to strangers, he _was_ social, and it wasn't hard to figure out that being on a team with two people that weren't—and Sam was honest enough to admit that the way he preferred to spend his down time made Prophet look like the life of the party—and not having other contacts in this country would be difficult for him. He wasn't sure that Mick had realized that until after he'd arrived, but it had been pretty obvious to Sam when Mick had started getting restless, and at the time he'd just hoped that Mick would connect to someone in one of his classes at the FBI. It seemed that Prophet was less of a loner than Sam had thought, though, or at least less of one when company was offered, and Mick seemed to have decided that Prophet was okay.

Sam suspected that a lot of it had to do with how well their senses of humor matched. Oh, he still had no idea why Mick had been insisting that he didn't sound like a gecko when he and Prophet had walked in this morning, but from Prophet's grin he had no doubt where the accusation had come from. Nor did he have any doubts about why Prophet's pens had spent the morning leaking on him, although he was a little bit curious about how Mick had done it. He didn't think Prophet knew either, given the way that he'd been examining the leaking pens before they'd left for lunch and the driving course, but aside from a few threats that he obviously had no intention of carrying out and a crumpled paper ball flung in the general direction of Mick's head when Mick had started snickering, he'd let it go. Which was about what Sam would have expected from Prophet.

He hadn't mentioned what had happened Friday to anyone, and he didn't plan to either given the reservations the director already had about Prophet, but it had surprised him more than he cared to admit. Oh, he understood _why_ Prophet had reacted like that; his response to a sudden grab around the throat would be to remove the threat as well, and given what he knew of conditions in prison his training had probably been a lot less harsh that anything that Prophet had gone through, but that kind of sudden, violent outburst…. Something to remember, he supposed. For all that Prophet was very good at projecting a harmless image, he was no more an average citizen than Sam or Mick was.

Sam shook his head and then shook it again and waved off Mick's questioning look. "Just thinking that you probably could pass the course if you treat the whole thing like an obstacle, but I'm afraid if you keep relaxing, you're going to keep running into trouble."

From the sideways glance Mick gave him, he didn't think that Mick believed him—and rightfully so, unfortunately, a side effect of having someone around who knew him as well as Mick did—but Prophet's muttered comment about Mick failing retroactively if he wiped out the certifying agent in the parking lot distracted Mick before he could call Sam on it.

"I will hurt you," Mick said, tilting his head up to glare into the rearview mirror.

Prophet snorted again. "How, heart failure? Get back on the other side of the road."

Mick returned his gaze to the front, jerking the wheel and letting out another mumbled curse, and Sam smiled.

* * *

"Are you sure?" Sam shook his head. "All right, thanks, Garcia."

"What's up?" Prophet asked, looking up from the cold case folder he'd been flipping through as Sam hung up the phone.

"Somehow Mr. Addison talked his way onto a flight down to Cabo and by all accounts has made himself at home at one of the resorts down there. He hasn't been in contact with anyone up here since he left."

Prophet stared at him for a moment and then shook his head. "Figures."

"Some leads don't pan out, that's just how it is. But Garcia is going to email us what she's got, if you want to pass it on to the authorities in Kentucky."

"Will do."

Sam nodded and was reaching for the folder he'd been working on before Garcia's call when the door flew open with a bang.

"So there!" Mick declared, bursting in waving a piece of paper.

Prophet, seated on his desk, was the closest to the door, and he caught the paper in his free hand when Mick shoved it in his general direction. It only took a moment for him to scan it, and then he handed it back and slapped Mick on the shoulder lightly. "Well, I'll be taking the bus from now on."

"Congratulations," Sam said with a smile as Mick snatched the folder from Prophet and hit him over the head with it. Mick had finished with the rest of the FBI courses last week, but the driving had taken longer than he'd expected—longer than Sam had expected too because someone at the bureau with more red tape than he knew what to do with had insisted that Mick combine getting signed off with getting a US driver's license which had involved not only shifting Mick's driving habits to US-standard but also sorting out some hassle with paperwork as well—and it was good to know that everything was finally done.

"So can I borrow your bike?" Mick asked, coming to lean against the edge of Sam's desk.

"Not a chance, and don't even think about trying your hotwiring trick."

Prophet chuckled.

"Ah, well, it was worth a try," Mick said, heaving an exaggerated sigh of disappointment.

Sam shook his head. "However, now that you're both done with everything…." He slid his chair back and dug around in the top drawer of his desk for the badges he'd picked up last week. The director hadn't been thrilled about handing them over—the fact that Mick wasn't fully certified yet had been the official reason for his reticence although Sam had no doubt that it was actually due to continuing concerns about Prophet—but Sam had talked him into it since he hadn't figured that either Mick or Prophet would have much interest in the whole FBI graduation ceremony. He smiled as he drew them out. They weren't _exactly _what he'd wanted, but they were enough to get his team into the field with him. "These would be for FBI agents Simms and Rawson."

"Yes!" Mick snatched both of them with a grin and wrapped an arm around Sam's shoulder quickly before pushing himself away from the desk and heading for Prophet, fanning them out in his hands as he went. "That's a horrible picture, man. But…." He twisted to frown at Sam. "Why does his say 'Pend'?"

"It was the best I could do," Sam said, looking past Mick to Prophet. "I'll keep working on it, but I'm afraid it's just going to take some time to convince the director." Time and a surviving child molester or two, Sam suspected, although he wasn't about to put a damper on things by bringing that up. And not that _he_ particularly wanted to be put on a case like that, as much as it was almost certainly going to happen at some point given the nature of the BAU. "It won't stop you from doing your job."

Prophet shook his head, pushing himself up off the desk, and the smile he gave Sam was the quiet one that Sam had only seen once before. "It's a hell of a lot more than I ever expected. Thank you."

Sam dipped his head slightly, but Mick's frown didn't fade as Prophet took the second badge from him, and Sam made a mental note to make sure that Mick had no reason to speak to the director at any point in the near future. One of the reasons that he liked Mick as much as he did was because of Mick's loyalty, but the fact that Mick had decided that Prophet was a friend and now someone wasn't playing fair with him…well, it would be better give Mick some time to let that irritation burn off. His mouth had gotten him into trouble before.

"You're commenting on my picture," Prophet said with a scoff, tilting Mick's badge back so he could see it. "Please. I mean, nice hair. Did you roll out of bed and in front of the camera?"

"Hey, at least I've still got all my hair," Mick shot back, distracted at least momentarily. "Not sure you've noticed, but yours is getting a little thin on top there."

Prophet rolled his eyes. "Yeah, you're hilarious. You wait a dozen years, and then we'll talk. Although they did manage to spell your name right, so I guess that's points for you."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

He shrugged. "Only one 'h' in my version of Jonathan. It's not a big deal."

"I will get that fixed," Sam said. He'd been concerned enough about just getting the badge that he hadn't even noticed the mistake.

Prophet shook his head. "I wouldn't waste your time considering the number of times it took me to convince them to just _file_ my paperwork. Besides, it'll be fine. It's not like I use that name much."

He had a point there, and after a moment Sam nodded. He'd request a new badge anyway and hope that they got it right, but even if they didn't, it wasn't likely that anyone would notice.

"All right then, if that's settled, how about we go get food to celebrate?" Mick said, looping an arm around Prophet's neck as he stuck his badge in his pocket. "He's paying. I'll drive."

"Hell, no, and also, hell, no. Especially considering that unless you stopped at a car lot on the way, you have to be talking about my car."

Mick grinned. "Bet I can get it started before you can stop me."

Prophet shook his head as Mick ducked back out the door and then looked down at the badge in his hand before tucking it into his wallet and returning his gaze to Sam. "Seriously, though. Thanks."

"It's yours, you deserve it. And the rest of it will get sorted out eventually." Sam stood. "But we should probably get going because he really can hotwire almost anything."

"Figures."


End file.
